...happens all the time on porn sites, because they hope to capture people searching for *real* information about every more-or-less public figure in hopes that they'll be drawn into the smut.

Unless you have beaucoup amounts of cash for lawyers laying about gathering dust, it doesn't really pay to do anything, and often not even then, because many such sites are "owned" through front companies in Lower Gronovia which consist entirely of a post box address.

And unless you've actually registered your copyright with the copyright office, there's usually little you can do that will pay for itself, much less yield enough to make it worthwhile.

The nice thing is that you can submit stories in a bundle every three months (you have to register within 90 days of publication), pay the fee, and you become eligible for statutary damages, so you don't have to prove actual damages, which is hard to do with a story posted for reading without payment. Stautory damages can be substantial.

Another tactic that sometimes helps is to complain to the search engine itself, telling them that your name is being used to spam the web (which is what this sort of misleading trolling is called) snd that it's defamatory. This *may* get their ranking lowered, so it's more difficult to find the slur, but almost every woman whose name appears on the web with any regularity has this happen to her. In fact, I just did a search for my real name coupled with a likely smutty search term and found that I'm linked to "porn-tube," and can assure you that you won't find my picture there.

The other thing you can try is to turn off "redirects" in your browser preferences. The way these things work is often that they put up what looks like legitimate content and offer it up to the search engines. They *also* put HTML on the page which causes sny browser which links to the page to be instantly redirected to their smut site. Few of the search engines are clever enough to recognise this, but you might be able to see the actual content that way, without paying for it, in which case you could write a cease and desist letter to have it taken down. But unless you can prove it, there's little to be done. Please note that it's possible, if one has direct access to the server, to hard code redirects into the server behaviour based on certain criteria, such as that the page request comes from a user rather than a robot, in which case you won't see the page unless you write your own bot or hack the server.

Cheers,

Puddintane
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Defamation is becoming a necessity of life; inasmuch as a dish of tea in the morning or evening cannot be digested without this stimulant
--- Thomas Jefferson