The Web Difference

Here is a Newsweek article about companies like Reputation Defender that help you manage your online persona by cleaning up unflattering information about you.  If I remember correctly, we briefly discusses Reputation Defender in the first week of class.

Something I find very interesting is the different techniques these companies use to clean up negative information.  Reputation Defender simply contacts hosts of websites with offending material and asks them to take it down.  On the other side of the spectrum, Done! SEO, which labels itself an “search engine marketing” firm, essentially Google bombs your name by linking to websites that you designate containing positive information about you.  The idea is to push the negative information to the third or fourth page of Google search results, which most people don’t bother checking.  The Done! method makes me uncomfortable because they also market the same service to get your business’ website at the top of the Google search results, thus (in my opinion) diluting the whole purpose of Google ranking their search results the way they do.

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