The Times reports on the latest trend in SEO marketing — manipulating search engines so that they bury a company’s bad news. Call it reputation management in the age of Google. Reputation cleansers work in much the same way search engine optimisation experts do: they create links from a client’s company to positive news, inflating the likeliness that the more affirmative result will appear prominently, drowning out the negative, when you type a brand into a search engine.

As The Times points out, such a service may be the only way to manage your reputation in the fast-moving digital age. As The Times puts it:

With almost a billion Google searches made every day, alongside an estimated
1.6m blog postings, it is harder than ever for internet surfers to know or
control what is being written about them.