Companies That Clean Up Bad Online Reputations 180
Radon360 writes "As the ever-increasing amount of information available online becomes indexed and searchable, more and more people find themselves potentially at risk of having unwanted personal information revealed or their names incorrectly associated with inflammatory topics. The are several firms that now sell their services of trying to remove or bury such information that their client deems offensive or troublesome. Companies, such as ReputationDefender and DefendMyName will, for a fee, do the legwork to find content that negatively impacts your reputation and have it removed or buried deeper in search rankings. However, some of these efforts can backfire, as the act to get it taken down can sometimes draw more attention than the offending content in the first place."
Suspicion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disturbing (Score:4, Insightful)
internet archive anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Approved? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when do Internet websites have to obey rules from anyone, especially a search engine?
If I ran a web-reputation repair company, I would do everything I could to determine what was "against" the rules in Google's mind and do it on every website where one or more of my clients had trouble. Consequently, those sites would be flagged "rule breakers" and immediately drop very low in Google's search ratings.
My job here is done!
Re:Suspicion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disturbing (Score:3, Insightful)
Or we could just become a bit more tolerant instead.