BrianKrebsIn May, I published a deep dive on a Pakistani firm that had just been charged w/ shipping fentanyl analogs to the US and was behind a sprawling empire of scam ghostwriting, app and logo design companies that were spending millions on Google ads to promote their scam businesses.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/pakistani-firm-shipped-fentanyl-analogs-scams-to-us/
The story received a decent amount of attention, but it almost immediately dropped off Google search entirely. Searching for the headline brought only links to other sites covering my report. This persisted for almost two weeks and I never got a satisfactory answer from Google about why the story dropped from search.
Just read a story at Ars Technica about how a tech CEO who was trying to quash reporting about his alleged misdeeds used a feature in Google known as Refresh Outdated Content to trick Google into deindexing the unflattering stories about him. The method he reportedly used was working until last month. Makes me wonder how widely known this bug was.
Raven667