Online Reputation Management Does Not Work: My Futile Attempts to Fix Negative Online Posts

One warm Spring afternoon in 2012 I was sitting bored at work when I did what most of us have done at one time or another: type my name into Google and press enter.  When my results appeared on the screen my mouth opened and my heart dropped.  I tried again, this time with quotation marks, hoping, praying, that this was some kind of mistake, a momentary glitch in a programmer’s algorithm.

But it wasn’t.

First I cried.  Then I panicked.  I closed the door to my office and, after I managed to stop pacing, looked again.  There, at the top of my search results, was a negative blog post, biased and one-sided but which referenced me and contained some nuggets of truth – enough, I knew, to get me fired if my employer were to see it.

Although I am occasionally tempted to bury my head in the sand, I have always been a man of action and, by the end of the day, had a plan.  I would write to the author of the post and ask him to (a) remove my name from the post and, failing that (b) offer to provide him with my side of the story in an attempt to correct the bias and inaccuracies.  So I sent off an e-mail and waited.  And waited, and waited.  I tried again.  Weeks went by and no response.

By that time, I was coming in to work each morning expecting to be called into my boss’s office for a little ‘chat’.  I felt the onset of paranoia as I wondered to myself who might decide to Google my name.  Every meeting and introduction became, for me, fraught with overtones as I carried on this inner analysis, trying to keep my head low and not attract attention or curiosity. 

Finally, I began to research internet reputation firms in the hope that they could rescue me.  As if to prove that they are good at their jobs, this can be a difficult task.  Type in a name and hit after glowing hit of (self-posted?) rave reviews is the result.  But after heavy digging I did manage to find one of the most reputable and picked up the phone with trepidation.  Would they delve into my past, asking uncomfortable questions about the subject of the negative post?  Would they grill me for personal details that could be used to combat the negative post?  Would they tell me my case was hopeless?

Well, I was soon on the line with a hearty young man who did none of the above.  After a cursory introductory Google search he made no specific mention of the post.  Rather, in a jovial, reassuring voice he assured me that they could, through proprietary methods, either remove posts entirely or push them so far down in the rankings that no one would ever find them.

So, after forking over $3,300 for their least expensive, month-long ‘campaign’, I found myself the newest client of a leading firm in this fast-growing industry.  The first step in the campaign was to fill-out a lengthy questionnaire containing personal and professional touchstones that could be used as content created by the firm and posted online.  I returned the completed questionnaire that very same day and, soon after, was given a raft of shoddily-drafted articles and blog posts prepared by their in-house (and clearly half-illiterate) journalist.  I edited the content (heavily) and then waited and waited and waited.

Each morning, to start the day, I Googled my name but saw no evidence of any of the posts.  The negative blog post had, in fact, moved up in the ratings from third to first.  I wrote e-mail after e-mail to my ‘manager’ at the firm but received only glib reassurances that everything was progressing as planned, that the posts took time to appear.  But as the end of the month (and the end of my campaign) approached, no positive posts had appeared. 

I wrote a scathing e-mail and sent it off to my manager who, amazingly, forwarded it up the food chain.  I was soon on the phone with his manager, who apologized profusely and offered me a free month, a continuation of my campaign.  Since I was still desperate for results I accepted.  This time the campaign proceeded more smoothly.  Within days I saw the first evidence of positive posts and soon after that, a search under my name returned page after page of ‘puff’ results.

The only problem?  The negative post, the target of all this effort, remained the number one search result for my name. It never budged, except to move up in the rankings.  Needless to say, I was upset, and it was at this point that I was introduced to the dark side of reputation management companies.  “Sorry,” I was told.  “No guarantees.  There are some results that we cannot fix and this is one of them.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me this at the start?”   The response was, “Well, we were hopeful that we could do something.”

Yeah, right.  They wanted my money and they got it.  Results were secondary.

I’m sure these firms have helped some customers.  Unfortunately, I was not one of them.  The moral of this story is that they peddle (expensive) miracles but offer, at best, a palliative, a couple of aspirins, when what the patient needs is a full-blown, life-saving operation.  What they do is time consuming and labor intensive but hardly rocket science.  They generate content, post it online, and then link it all together in a lame attempt to game the algorithms.  Sometimes they get lucky and manage to ‘fix’ results by pushing negative posts lower in the rankings.  More often, I suspect, their efforts are in vain.

As for me, that negative post is still out there, still appearing as the top result under a search of my name.  So far I have been lucky – apparently no one at work has searched my name.  But I go into work thinking that each day will be my last.  And it very well could be.