
The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management - hackerlass
http://nymag.com/news/features/online-reputation-management-2013-6/
======
draugadrotten
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.

~~~
agravier
> 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.

You possibly just blew it.

~~~
gwern
Heck, if the dude's money really was on Cyprus, revenge may already be his.

~~~
mahmud
Unless the guy is a Russian "businessman", then he lost nothing.

------
fairywings
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.

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noelwelsh
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.

~~~
enko
> somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites

Maybe it's my misplaced faith in human nature but I think this kind of thing
is almost self-regulating.

> not that I'm interested in pursuing it

Exactly.

It's funny how money works. I'm sure there's a lot of HN users reading this
thinking "well fuck that, ten grand a month!" I guarantee you that after 6
months 99% of those people would be looking at themselves and wondering what
they were doing with their lives. Getting a bit of money saves you from the
wolves at the door - bills, rent, worrying about what you buy. And then you're
in your nice, warm, fully paid up home and you get to face the real monster -
the mirror.(†)

Which is why these rich guys are paying through the nose for this nonsense in
the first place, of course. Because that guy in the mirror is taunting them.
Take money for doing something you know is wrong and he'll taunt you, too.

The thing is, though, you can have as many fake philanthropy sites as you
want, but you can't fool that guy in the mirror.

(†) Or the whiskey bottle. Same thing really.

------
socillion
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...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reputation%20management%2Conline%20reputation%20management)

~~~
samstave
This is what HBGary did for the USG....

------
shabble
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.

~~~
JamesArgo
It's amazing, reading Vinge, how his writing just keeps getting better and
better. Though the "deepness" novels may still be his best, I was surprised by
how poetically written, perhaps because a key character was a poet, _Rainbow
's End_ was. Vinge really knows where his towel is.

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

[http://gizmodo.com/5730979/erotic-art-museum-sues-
photograph...](http://gizmodo.com/5730979/erotic-art-museum-sues-photographer-
for-2-million-because-its-worried-about-its-pristine-reputation)

[http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2011/07/04/how-
stockbroker...](http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2011/07/04/how-stockbroker-
andrew-peterson-aka-thomas-hawk-smeared-photographer-jay-maisel-in-andy-baio-
copyright-row/)

"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"

------
Uperte
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-...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/fixing-the-reputations-
of-reputation-managers-02022012.html)

------
cm2012
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).

------
zipfle
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.

------
thu
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.

~~~
troels
Nah, they endorse you by accident, most likely. Linkedin incessantly buggers
its users with requests to endorse ones connections. You almost have to make
an effort NOT to endorse, if you navigate the site.

~~~
mpclark
"Bugs", surely? Although you may be right...

~~~
troels
Curious. I'm not a native speaker, but I thought "bugger" could be used in
that way. Not so?

~~~
mpclark
No, as a verb it pretty much only has one meaning, which you should look up :)
Kudos on your English though. I'd never have guessed you aren't a native
speaker.

~~~
troels
Oh. That could be cause for an ackward situation, I guess.

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kposehn
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.

------
neona
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...

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

[http://socialdraft.com](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.

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

~~~
gwern
> But when sleuthing through the metadata, I noticed other names thrown in
> incongruously: Joe Ricketts, Helen Lee Schifter, Irena Briganti, Antonio
> Weiss, and Luke Weil. I also noticed the same Wikipedia editor, Belkin555,
> had tidied the entries of several of them.

~~~
salimmadjd
I meant how many of Wikipedia entites are groomed by PR firms

