The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management

I suffered harm from a negative SEO campaign like this.

I was in a relationship with a young woman, whose father is a wealthy CEO of a public company. I will never be able to prove it, but he arranged for my name to be smeared. He ensured that when you google my name, "arrested" showed up in Google instant search. Needless to say, my clients were not thrilled.

He also got the local newspaper to carry a story about an anonymous person in a very specific field of work (mine) who allegedly was being reported for sexual harassment. Again, I can't prove anything, as no names were mentioned, only very direct hints. The newspaper article cost me more than a few friends and who knows how much business.

My lawyer advised me to avoid this guy and recommended that I terminate the relationship with the young woman. I did, and I never told her why.

I have since made several attempts to contact Google to get them to remove the negative search results, but so far I have not received a reply.

I am slowly gathering a pile of evidence of major tax evasion towards her father and his off-shore accounts on Cyprus, and one day revenge will be mine. Justice I have no hope for.

I was on the other end of of one of these campaigns. It was extremely distressing, having fictional articles pop up every other day. The dispute was over a post I made outing a scammer. In the end (2 months and 50 posts) I folded and removed the post.

After I made peace with the scammers I was then contacted by a reputation management company that tried to extort more cash from me and started posting more articles. Thankfully it ended when I didn't respond.

It's really the lowest level of entrepreneurialism and one that should be shunned. When I have some spare money I will tell the internet that i'm an astronaut just to prove a point.

Fascinating post. Reading about the somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites made me think there is a good business opportunity here automating the system -- not that I'm interested in pursuing it. I imagine the market for this service is very inefficient, as clients obviously don't like to talk about it and thus it is difficult to gauge quality.

This is the relatively easily executed version of negative SEO: it's hard to negatively affect the SEO of a site, but easy to bury it with dozens of crafted pages - whether to hide an unfavorable result, or to discredit a competitor. $10,000 a month seems like an absurd number, but "reputation management" is a big business (albeit very quietly executed) and getting content on sufficiently high pagerank sites can be expensive.

If you look on sites like blackhatworld you'll find tons of people interested in services like this.

Seems like the business is booming, too: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reputation%20managem...

The bit on the last page

"I imagined a future in which rich people create dozens of scapegoats for themselves, like [...] body doubles, and wondered how some data-mining bot might tell the difference."

reminds me of the "Friends of Privacy" in Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge[1]:

"[T]he web browser was much like the ones he remembered, even though many sites couldn't be displayed properly. Google still worked. He searched for Lena Llewelyn Gu. Of course, there was plenty of information about her. Lena had been a medical doctor and rather well known in a limited, humdrum way. And yes, she had died a couple of years ago. The details were a cloud of contradiction, some agreeing with what Bob told him, some not. It was this damn Friends of Privacy. It was hard to imagine such villains, doing their best to undermine what you could find on the net. A "vandal charity" was what they called themselves."

[1] Incidentally, a must-read for anyone wondering about possible implications of Google-Glass-like VR/AR technology.

The flip side of this is someone with an influential blog (high PageRank) etc. can easily use this to smear someone and there's absolutely nothing the target can do about it.

For example, look at Thomas Hawk (aka Andrew Peterson).

In the past, his (occasionally mis-guided) vitriol has been aimed at various targets. It's tapered down since he was sued but it remains appalling how someone with so much pent up anger is able to adversely affect others.

http://www.edrants.com/is-thomas-hawk-a-first-rate-jerk/

http://gizmodo.com/5730979/erotic-art-museum-sues-photograph...

http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2011/07/04/how-stockbroker...

"Shortly afterward Peterson / Hawk caved in, reached an out of court agreement with the museum, removed the allegations of fraud from his blog, and replaced the offending Flickr set with an abject apology so humiliating it’s practically a Private Eye parody."

"With great power comes great responsibility"

Funny thing is that many ORM companies fail at guarding own reputation:

Yet the industry has its own image problem. Even the most prominent player, Reputation.com, which charges $3,000 per year—and often many times that—to police search results for clients can’t entirely cleanse its own profile. The company’s first page of Google results is free of negative content, but when a user types the company name into the search box, Google’s auto-complete feature often suggests “Reputation.com scam” as one of the choices. “To solve this for ourselves is not an option based on the time and money we’d have to put into it,” says Michael Fertik, chief executive officer of the Redwood City (Calif.) company, which is backed by more than $67 million in venture funding. “Sometimes you can move content from page two to page five of Google, but the cost becomes so high that it’s not realistic.” Source: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/fixing-the-reputations-...

It is much more expensive to bury your search engine results if your name is plastered on major sites, so you can pretty easily protect yourself in a couple of steps.

Never fight a battle you don’t have to. From now on, pick a middle name, real or imaginary. Use this name on your resume, business social media accounts, Facebook, etc.

Use your new full name on all the obvious social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, Google +). Then you get creative - leave reviews for books in your field on Amazon using your new full name, they always kill. Make a quora account with the name. Make a meet-up account with the full name, etc.

This won't make it impossible to smear your search results, but it changes it from a couple $100 in outsourcing to a multi-thousand dollar a year project. Best advantage of this, it costs you almost nothing to change all of this to a new middle name if your enemy does spend the money. Spam anchor text can't be changed without doing the whole campaign again, even if they can change the smear websites, which many times they can't (since its published elsewhere).

If future potential sources google the article author's name, they're going to find a vindictive-sounding article in which he fails to adequately protect the anonymity of sources to whom he explicitly promised it. Too bad there's no way to get something removed from google.

Interesting story. I don't want to make any checks, but it seems the story itself could be false; in some way that's even more interesting. E.g. all the sites that are mentionned could exist, but have been created long ago to give this story credits.

This also makes me think to all those people that endorse me on linkedin, presumably so that I endorse them back.

This is basic rep management and has been around for quite some time.

I don't really find it surprising - probably because I'm so plugged into the online ad space - but I'm a little off-put by how the author so clearly puts the actual names of people out there that he found.

Surely few, if any, are totally innocent, but was that necessary? "Chad", who spoke on the condition of anonymity, has had his cover blown (if he is presumably one of those the author already listed). How would you sleep at night knowing that you had allowed a source you let speak anonymously be found out within just a few minutes of amateur sleuthing in your article? I find it abhorrent.

I can't help but think that sounds like some fairly easy money.

Too bad I'd rather not help rich people that probably don't need the help, and likely need to know rich people to get into the market...

A bit of self-promotion but we started a reputation management SaaS firm aimed at small/medium businesses.

http://socialdraft.com

We've been in the SMB space for a few years offering digital PR services for businesses who really don't have the tools or manpower to deal with the Web. I can't tell you how many clients we have that are pissed at Yelp or some blogger and have threaten legal action. We saw this as an opportunity because the "pain point" is real.

The author should have also added Wikipedia editing and creating as well.