JOON MO KANG

A new breed of Web specialists, known as online reputation managers, are offering to expunge negative posts, bury unfavorable search results and monitor a client’s virtual image.

In an age when a person’s reputation is increasingly defined by Google, Facebook and Twitter, these services offer what is essentially an online makeover, improving how someone appears online , usually by spotlighting flattering features and concealing negative ones.

“The Internet has become the goto resource to destroy someone’s life online, which in turn means their off- line life gets turned upside down, too,” said Michael Fertik, the chief executive of Reputation.com, which is in Redwood City, California, and is among the largest in this field. “We’ve reached a point where the Internet has become so complicated, vast and fastpaced, that people can’t control it by themselves anymore. They now need an army of technologists to back them up online.”

As people began living more of their lives online, whether it was blogging about dinner or posting vacation photos on Facebook, the downside to oversharing began to catch up.

“It’s been a relatively nascent industry for a while, but fast forward to today and it’s become more mainstream,” said Bryce Tom, the former director of online reputation management at Rubenstein Communications, a major public relations firm in New York. Mr. Tom left the firm last year to start Metal Rabbit Media, a reputation management company.

While Mr. Tom’s firm attracts a more affluent clientele, other companies report a broad customer base. It includes college students trying to delete drunken party photos before corporate recruiters find them, a corporate lawyer who wanted to remove non-work-related photos of himself from the Web as he tried to become a partner within his law firm, and a real estate agent in Miami whose listings were obscured by blog posts that chronicled an arrest for driving under the influence.

“Social networks, online comments and oversharing online have created a threat to everyone’s reputation and privacy,” said Mr. Fertik of Reputation. com. “Now people are trying to figure out how to put that toothpaste back in the bottle.”

Once something is online, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to delete.

So tweaking one’s online reputation usually comes down to fooling the search engines. Image-conscious people with an understanding of the Web’s architecture can try doing it themselves, by populating the Web with favorable content. That might involve setting up their own Web site or blog, or signing up for popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

With any luck, those sites will appear first on a Web search, and push down any offending material. But these tactics have their limits, especially when the Web sites in question are popular and optimized for search engines.

Online reputation managers go further by exploiting how search engines like Google and Bing work, which is to rank Web pages based on how often they are linked from other sites. To trick the search engines, these managers employ programmers who create dummy Web sites that link to a client’s approved list of search results. The more links, the higher the approved sites rank.

The price of looking good online varies widely. Reputation.com charges $120 to $600 a year for ordinary cases.

“Celebrities, politicians and highlevel executives aren’t so lucky,” Mr. Tom said. “Their programs typically average between $5,000 and $10,000 a month due to the higher level of finesse necessary and because the stakes are much higher.”

“The hardest thing is when you have a very unique name,” added Don Sorenson, the founder of Big Blue Robot, an online reputation management company in Utah. “If you have a last name like Smith or Brown, you’re going to be better off, but if you have a unique name you will definitely have your work cut out for you.”


By NICK BILTON