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Internet Google-Proof PR?
May 25, 2007
By Andy Greenberg
Sue Scheff's business, Parents
Universal Resource Experts, places troubled teens in reform
schools--and generates a lot of controversy. Disgruntled clients
have accused Scheff's company of sending kids to abusive programs,
and the Web is full of complaints: A quick Google search used to
reveal sites describing her as a "fraud," a "con artist" and a
"crook."
Google Scheff's name now, however,
and the first few pages of results are far less controversial: They
include Scheff's own sites about teen pregnancy, her upcoming book,
and, until recently, recipes for broccoli casserole and pork chops.
That last one might seem strange to
Scheff's friends, who know she doesn't cook. "The truth is, if it
doesn't go in the microwave, I don't make it," she admits.
So who wrote the cooking advice at
sue-scheff.net? Not Sue Scheff. That site, and many of the others in
the first several pages of Sue Scheff's Google results, were
designed by a company called Reputation Defender, which sells what
its founder, Michael Fertik, calls "Google insulation." For a fee,
Reputation Defender pads the Web with friendly-sounding content like
flattering blog entries, personal sites and other positive pages,
and then pushes those sites to the top of the Google (nasdaq: GOOG -
news - people ) results for clients like Scheff, thereby hiding the
online insults of her enemies.
And there's plenty of vitriol to
hide. In 2004, she filed a defamation lawsuit against one of her
critics, Carey Bock, in a Florida state court. Scheff won an $11.3
million verdict last year, but some negative commentary remained on
the Web. Scheff says those comments were ruining her business,
driving away more than half of her customers. "She had just
slandered me up one side and down the other side of the Internet,"
Scheff says.
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.
"Say you have 20,000 delighted
clients and five clients that hate you," says Fertik. "We'll tell
your story on the Internet and find press about you and start
promoting that to the top of the Google chain. It's very
Internet-specific PR, a very different game." For that
labor-intensive service, officially called MyEdge, the company
charges a hefty price: Fees start at around $10,000. Fertik says he
has more than 25 clients for the service.
MyEdge's success is based not only
in creating reputation-boosting pages but also in convincing Google
to float those sites to the first few pages of results, the only
results that most Web users ever see. But gaming Google can be
tricky. The search giant, which declined to comment on Reputation
Defender's service, spends significant resources trying to prevent
Web site owners from pushing up their ranking artificially. And it
will punish sites it thinks are cheating by pushing them into the
back pages of search results. (see "Condemned To Google Hell").
Fertik won't reveal the details of
MyEdge's tactics, but he says he's confident they don't break
Google's rules or those of any other search engine. He also says his
company draws the line at publishing lies about individuals or
businesses--the cooking site created for Sue Scheff, he says, was an
unfortunate exception, one that he removed after talking to this
reporter. But Fertik sees nothing wrong with manipulating Google to
focus on the positive aspects of someone's persona.
"Google is not God," he says. "It's
a machine, a superb machine that benefits millions, but it's still
just a machine. And what it turns up can have remarkably deleterious
impact on hardworking people and businesses."
Some might still argue that MyEdge
misleads Web users or that it muzzles them by hiding negative
opinions. But Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Internet
free-speech advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sees
MyEdge as a healthy alternative to the usual angry-lawyer school of
reputation management.
"As long as they're not committing
some kind of fraud, I think this is the way to deal with bad
speech," says Bankston. "This shows that you don't need to counter
speech by attempting to censor it, but rather with better and more
accurate information. As the truism goes, the best answer to bad
speech is always more speech."
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