The Internet suffers from a number of afflictions that the real world escapes from. We know the funny ones, LOLcats and Youtube, but the most serious one, in my humble opinion, is online libel. In the real world, if someone slanders you—you can take them to court, insult them in return, or simply ignore it. You have options, although they might not sound like appetizing ones. On the Internet, there are no options.

The anonymity of the Internet makes it possible for anyone to say anything about a company or person. There is absolutely no recourse for those who have been slandered, nor is there any way to hold commenters accountable for their words. This should result in a great deal of suspicion on behalf of Internet-browsers, but that is unfortunately not so. Instead, there is just a great deal of slander, or libel, against companies and individuals. This often occurs because of teenagers who have too much time, former employees who are still upset, or competitors who want to utilize the anonymity of the Internet in an under-handed way.

There is a way to deal with this, though, thanks to online reputation management. This is an industry which helps to de-emphasize negative articles and blog posts and replace them with positive publicity. ReputationHAWK is one of the leading businesses in this industry. They have received national media attention from newspapers like The New York Post and Chicago Tribune, magazines like Time and Newsweek, and shows like The Early Show.

Search reputation management is beneficial to virtually every industry, assuming that they are even slightly concerned about their image, on or offline. So what is it? It is the process of pushing down, or hiding, negative search results about you or your company in order to cultivate a more positive image. The article below makes the argument for search reputation management as it related to the interests of web masters.
http://www.businesshostingprovider.com/internet-marketing/reputation-management.htm

This article gives some great tips and definitely hits the nail on the head when it says that “The Internet is more and more made of consumer generated content: forums, blogs, message boards etc, and search engines easily index these types of media.” Forums, blogs, and message boards can be far more dangerous to a company’s image than multi-million dollar ad campaigns by the opposition. Why? Because the Internet is free and anonymous. Internet reputation management can rectify this problem by allowing companies to subvert negative search results.
http://www.dceb.ie/news/online-reputation-management