Why don't they just use robots.txt to keep themselves out of Google's index?
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Has Google stopped using that directive?
"Equustek Solutions based in Burnaby B.C., which manufacturers networking technology. Equustek had successfully sued another company for relabelling its products and passing them off as their own."
When the evil corp lost in Canada, it moved out of the country and continued the same practice.
Frankly, I'm disappointed in Google for fighting this in the first place. SMH. Imagine if this were Apple rebranding Samsung Galaxies as Apple devices. Of course Google should remove those product listings.
This case is much more complicated however. It's two business partners who had a falling out and both tried to put each other out of business. The marketing guy kept their own brand and customer base while the tech guy tried to rebrand and sell his products on his own. The marketing guy hired an engineer to make a new product that does the same function. The tech guy accuses him of copying his technology.
http://robertfleminglawyers.com/pdf/2012_BCSC_1490_Equustek_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_passing_off#Reverse_pa...
Otherwise you might have uncrawled, but indexed entries in search results, if a URL is popular for some reason (linked somewhere else etc.)
> You can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex meta tag in the page's HTML code. When Googlebot next crawls that page, Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.
> Important! For the noindex meta tag to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex tag, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
And just to clarify, this article was about Equustek obtaining a further injunction from the court ordering Google to remove the websites from its global search results.