saving your reputation

Seen on an article on Forbes.com

So Scheff turned to Reputation Defender. Founded last October, the company says it monitors what's written about clients online for a monthly $10 fee and will have specific content "destroyed" for an extra $30. The removal of content usually involves polite take-down requests that occasionally escalate into cease-and-desist letters and legal threats when necessary, says the company's chief executive, Michael Fertik.

But Reputation Defender recently began offering users a subtler approach: hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive, Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of search-engine results.

This is really bad-shit. The possibility of gaming the system is real and there are companies building business around it. This is perhaps where Y! answers provide an edge, though even they can be gamed (post your own questions and then use another user id to post the answers. An even crafty way would be to pay the top answerers to "plug-in" your company). Is the problem of finding out the reputation of an entity a machine-solvable problem ? My bet is "Yes".

link to forbes article