The story is five years old. The charges were dropped, the lawsuit settled, the context long since changed. But the article ranks on page one for your name, and every new acquaintance, employer, and client reads it first. You cannot make the publisher take it down. You can, in many cases, make search engines stop showing it.
Delisting outdated news is a different game from removing fake reviews or scam listings. News publishers have strong protections, and search engines are reluctant to hide journalism. The requests that work are narrow, well-documented, and aimed at the right target.
A delisting request asks a search engine to remove a URL from results for queries on your name. It does not delete the article. The publisher keeps it, direct links still work, and it can still rank for other queries. You are asking for the name-query association to be broken, which is usually what matters.
In the EU and UK, this has a legal framework: the right to be forgotten, with a formal request process and an appeals path. In the US, there is no equivalent law, so requests go through the search engines' voluntary removal policies, which are narrower and more discretionary. Know which regime you are in before you file.
Successful requests share a structure: the information is outdated, it is causing ongoing harm, and the public interest in the old story does not outweigh your privacy interest. Dropped charges, expunged records, settled disputes with the settlement terms, and stories about minors all fit this pattern. Document the update: court records showing dismissal, the settlement agreement, the correction the publisher ran.
Recency and relevance matter. A ten-year-old article about a resolved matter is a stronger case than a two-year-old article about an ongoing dispute. Search engines weigh whether the public still has a legitimate interest in finding this when searching your name. Your job is to show that the legitimate interest has expired.
Asking the publisher to delete the article almost never works, and threatening them usually makes it worse. News organizations treat deletion requests as censorship attempts and sometimes write about the attempt, which creates a second article ranking for your name. Do not do this.
Reputation-management tricks backfire. Flooding the web with positive content to bury the article sometimes works temporarily, but fake reviews and manufactured profiles get detected and removed, and the article pops back up. Suppression through legitimate delisting requests is slower but durable.
Do not file the same request repeatedly with no new information. Search engines track repeat filings, and duplicates get dismissed faster each time. File once, file well, and appeal with new evidence if denied.
Outdated news articles can be delisted from name searches when the story is stale, the harm is ongoing, and the public interest has expired. File a precise request with documentation of what changed, aim at the search engine rather than the publisher, and do not try to game it. The article stays on the internet. It just stops being the first thing people see.
Can I get a news article deleted from the publisher's site?
Almost never. Publishers rarely delete journalism. The realistic goal is delisting: removing the article from search results for queries on your name, which the search engine can do without the publisher's cooperation.
Does the right to be forgotten apply in the US?
No. The US has no equivalent law, so requests go through search engines' voluntary removal policies, which are narrower. The EU and UK have formal request processes with appeal rights.
How long does a delisting request take?
Weeks to months depending on the jurisdiction and the search engine's queue. EU requests have regulatory timelines; voluntary US requests do not, so follow-up matters.