Reputation management firms bury Google results by placing flattering content

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-1-scrubs-its-image-online-11576233000

by eplanit • 7 years ago

301 126 7 years ago

neonate• 7 years ago

Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured some of the articles on Google News.

So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. Setting up fake new websites to generate content for clients to drown out real stores characterizing their misdeeds. All for just a few thousand per month.

This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time.

jsonne• 7 years ago

This is a very well understood and existing market for PR agencies utilizing blackhat SEO. Overrun legitimate but negative stories with shady backlinks to get Google to penalize them. Simultaneously create fake websites, awards, profiles, news etc and flood search results with more positive things. Most people I see selling this do so for 5k to 10k per month.

cookiecaper7• 7 years ago

Yes, SEO is still big business, and it's big business because it's effective. For any term that has even minor commercial relevance, you've generally gotta dig into at least the 3rd or 4th page before you start to see real results.

Google has been successfully gamed essentially for its entire history. The fact that so many technical people believe the propaganda like "SEO doesn't work anymore" just shows how disconnected and gullible they are. And if technical people are naively Googling away, how much hope does that leave for your average citizen?

pjc503• 7 years ago

I mean, why not? Free speech means unlimited freedom to lie, right? To do otherwise would be surrender to an arbiter of truth.

This is just how it is going to be now. Every search and every set of YouTube recommendations will contain a thousand lies and one truth, and it's your fault if you can't identify the true one.

save_ferris5• 7 years ago

Free speech means unlimited freedom to lie, right?

This has never been, and will never be true. Free speech has always had legal limitations. It’s illegal to defame someone, for example.

Who really wants to live in a world where it’s so much easier and effective to lie than to tell the truth? Where the burden of seeking the truth becomes finding a needle in a haystack, do you want to live in that world?

History has shown us when societies fail to recognize the truth, and it has only ever brought death and destruction.

If the freedom to spread lies far and wide without repercussions overpowers our society’s ability to function, we’re in for some deep trouble.

doublement• 7 years ago

Taking your hyperbole at face value for a moment, at least whoever put the true item in there will be allowed to do so, instead of needing approval.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

Even well-meaning folk can 'lie' when they repeat something demonstrably false that was said by someone that they trust.

People who are smart in some ways can get fished-in by scams & frauds if they don't have the street-smarts to 'smell a rat'.

'How it is going to be' is the way it has always been. Lots of stuff happened in US history that most people alive at the time were unaware of. Those in power counted on it.

We now have the means to look into statements -much- more deeply -and- quickly than anyone 30 years ago could have done ... if we know where to look. We have the tools, if we choose to use them. If not, then we'll live like the people of the past did ... pushed and shoved around by politics, religion, rumor, time.

aguyfromnb• 7 years ago

This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time.

That's why all the squawking about "The Russians! The Russians!" is so hilarious.

The kind of work Cambridge Analytica and these boiler rooms in Russian are doing isn't very sophisticated, and certainly doesn't require the backing of a foreign State. A couple of savvy tech people can (and do) inflict the same pain for reasonable sums of money.

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

That it's relatively easy to do makes it more likely nation states are getting involved, not less.

seppin6• 7 years ago

Russian military intelligence broke into DNC servers, stole emails, then gave them to a fake media cutout (wikileaks) to present in the most damaging way possible.

So no, states are getting into this game.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

"Independent" news orgs do the same thing. Watch out for the next positive article about a person or organization and ask yourself if it was written by a journalist organisation seeking the truth or as a puff piece in collaboration with the subject. There is a pretty blurry line between news and advertising these days to a much greater extent than most realize.

altec3• 7 years ago

Southpark has a pretty good episode on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro

saagarjha• 7 years ago

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

malandrew3• 7 years ago

Watch out for the next positive article about a person or organization

The only reason this heuristic works is because news companies have become so untrustworthy that when left to their own devices they are only capable of writing negative articles about people. They never take the initiative to report positive news when a person or organization merits it. Even when a person or organization deserves praise, the media finds a way to spin it into a "if it bleeds, it leads" story.

briandear• 7 years ago

Almost every major media organization does this. For example, impeachment coverage was carried live, while the discussion of the FISA abuses was mostly ignored. If media orgs were “seeking the truth,” they wouldn’t be selectively covering hearings that boost their narrative but fail to tell the complete story. Another example: Buzzfeed “News” had one critical story on Obama out of 100 total stories. Even if you love Obama, suggesting that he was “good” 99 out of 100 times is pure propaganda. Selective editing and coverage decisions are far more sinister than reputation management firms.

save_ferris5• 7 years ago

What’s so frustrating about this is that Status Labs will never be called out for this. And even if they do, they’d probably use their platform of fake news outlets to drown out criticism, because this is exactly what they do for a living.

Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken, and here are these guys making a killing by literally lying to the world.

nathancahill• 7 years ago

A guy was pitching me his SEO services as being the best in the business. He offered me his business card but I said, don't worry, when I need an SEO guy I'll search google for one and you should be the first result!

jeffdavis• 7 years ago

"Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken"

Is it worse than before or was it always broken?

gumby4• 7 years ago

By and large business magazines have always been nothing but puff pieces. Those cover-story interviews with execs are always puffery in the hope of getting "access" in future and of course advertising.

These fake sites simply cut out the middleman.

The Economist has been one of the rare exceptions, though it's not really a business magazine...and has a regular profile page that is indeed the same sort of puff piece.

selectodude• 7 years ago

Are you referring to the obituary?

Animats2• 7 years ago

Forbes, in the days of Malcomb Forbes, Sr., wasn't. He was hated for it, and he didn't care. He was sued, and his attitude was "I'm a billionare, go ahead".

rchaud• 7 years ago

The Economist manages to escape this because they don't do any journalism or interviews. They provide opinionated commentary on international affairs, peppered with quotes from reports and think tank policy people. And as a result, their analyses are often limited, and can mostly be summarized as "liberalizing the markets would have solved this".

endorphone• 7 years ago

"So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election"

Is this an equivocation?

One are tiny, marginally impactful capitalist firms run by private individuals. The other are enormous nation-states that can wield the power of government -- and literal control over life or death -- to influence. Acting surprised as if this = that is specious and not useful.

superfrank• 7 years ago

This isn't even anything new.

My first dev job out of college was in 2012 at a small media agency. We had some bigger clients, but we also still managed some super basic websites for local doctors, lawyers, etc that were some of our first clients when we the company was just starting up.

One day the CEO comes in and says, "We need someone to work with another company to make some changes to one of the websites and this is urgent". Since I was new and it was just text changes I got assigned the task.

Basically, one of the plastic surgeons who's site we managed was being sued for malpractice, and it was high profile enough that it made some local news websites. This surgeon hired a "reputation management" company to do pretty much what was explained in this article.

My job was basically to get on a call with this company and make the changes they requested, which was basically taking lines from the articles and working them into the surgeons website. So if a news article's said "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon is accused of malpractice" we would go through his website and change text from "Dr Bloblaw" to "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon" where ever we could. Additionally, they requested that I hide "Dr Bloblaw malpractice" and similar terms in small white text all over every page and some other black hat SEO shit. I'm sure there was more to it, since I took 3 or 4 calls with them spread out over a month, but I can't remember more details.

I'm long gone from that company and I'm sure those techniques don't work anymore, but yeah, in one form or another this type of reputation management is probably as old as SEO.

(Names and locations are changed)

jv22222• 7 years ago

This isn’t anything new

Yep. I first heard about “reputation” firms doing this in 2009.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

Which can be summarised as the "PR industry", and much of the history of SEO and overlaps with the thousands of agencies out there. Goes back to the earliest rings of blogspot spam promoting some dubious business or service. I think it was already a thing the very first time I became aware of SEO as something beyond just the local on page organisation of site, tags and such like. So probably mid 00's.

There have, of course, been no shortage of press stories about the tiny minority ethical side of this - allowing some crime victim to move beyond the story of their attack or similar.

The press don't - at least as far as I have seen - yet seem to connect any of the above with the relatively recent influence on elections, stories of fake news, or use by politicians themselves as reputation management (e.g. that Boris Johnson interview where he was randomly claiming out of nowhere, and thoroughly unbelievably, his hobby is making model busses out of cardboard boxes. Gets reported everywhere, the £350m promises on the side of the Brexit bus gets moved down a Google page or two).

LudwigNagasena• 7 years ago

This isn’t even anything new x2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations_campaigns_of_...

take_a_breath• 7 years ago

The Texas GOP is planning to do similar in 2020 [1]. It’s also happening in small towns across the country [2].

[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/11/26/republic...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/locality-lab...

chatmasta• 7 years ago

Not only that, but there's a startup doing it openly and being celebrated for it in 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-25/acronym-s...

rolltiide• 7 years ago

lol this is how its always been

We only investigated it this time due to cold war sentiments and weaponizing an obviously compromised candidate for the highest position in the land

Any other combination of this is not newsworthy, such as a PR company that happens to be in Portugal, or Rhode Island

iudqnolq• 7 years ago

So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing

Both are scummy, but there's no clear law against this IF you're not a foreign agent. Surely it's believable that the government might want to forbid foreign operatives from doing things Americans are allowed to do. A trivial example is voting.

TomMckenny• 7 years ago

So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election.

When it's done by a foreign government, it's an act of aggression. When it's done internally, it's an expression of camping financing.

Like brain cancer vs skin cancer I suppose.

ajross• 7 years ago

So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election.

The core accusation with 2016 isn't "fake news", it's that a foreign intelligence service deliberately targetted a senior campaign staffer, stole his email, and selectively leaked it at the direction of the opposing US campaign.

The fake news stuff was bad too, but that's not generally considered criminal. The remedy to that was universally considered to be better gatekeeping on the part of the content intermediates (Facebook in that case, Google here).

lonelappde• 7 years ago

Nothing "1%" about this, it's basic business PR.

b0rsuk• 7 years ago

I also got a broader message from this: there is a whole industry of services aimed at only the wealthiest 1%, and you don't hear about it. We're starting to live in a new class society, and for now the new nobility wants to stay out of view.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

What makes you think this is new?

fastball• 7 years ago

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...

whitepoplar• 7 years ago

I'd be curious to see a list of them!

AWildC182• 7 years ago

To add at least some substance, a big one is how you go about buying extreme luxury goods. If you want a private jet, million dollar car, yacht, down to bespoke ultra high end watches, suits, etc. you schedule an appointment and get vetted before you even walk in the door. It's not a showroom affair where you just walk in and buy something.

opportune• 7 years ago

I know some people who worked on building bespoke software/automation systems for the homes of the ultra rich.

There are of course family office wealth management firms, know a few people there too. Basically if you have >$10bb (min threshold might be less, but their clients are in this range) you might just make your own wealth management firm where everyone is 100% focused on your stuff only.

A lot of the services only for the ultra rich are kind of boring though, boiling down to running large personnel teams for specialized tasks. Like chefs/catering, cleaning and groundskeeping, transportation.

pjc503• 7 years ago

FT "How to spend it" magazine. The economist has something similar.

DonHopkins• 7 years ago

Do you mean "anal bleaching service" has both a straightforward literal meaning, as well as a figurative meaning of whitewashing assholes?

thaumasiotes2• 7 years ago

It seems like a stretch to say nobody ever hears about PR.

ryanmercer2• 7 years ago

I'm not saying that these companies should exist for the example in the article, a high profile business person that failed miserably and tried to do the same thing a second time, yes it is just downright wrong he has a bunch of apparently fake PR about him claiming he's great and a genius and give him your money.

However, there are valid use cases for such a service. There are things you and I might say or do in haste that quickly get forgotten and are never even seen by most of the population but...

The "1%" are in the spotlight, they can't go an ice cream cone without articles about their ice cream appearing online [1].

What if a high profile individual is falsely accused of rape, or of fathering a child, and it turns out it was a false accusation. Those dozens or hundreds of articles/tweets/videos aren't going to go away. It will quietly be announced by a handful of places "so and so was cleared, person was lying" and for months or decades those accusation articles are going to stay high on search results.

If John Smith gets a DUI, unless he did a bunch of property damage or killed someone in the process, an article isn't going to be written. If a billionaire does it [2] articles get written.

If a billionaire calls someone a pedo in a heated exchange, articles are written about it [3]. If Jane Doe calls someone a pedo (or worse) on twitter, one of her 13 followers might favorite the tweet, if another human being even reads it.

I imagine a significant percentage of people using these services aren't trying to defraud people, but simply trying to hide something embarrassing that has been preserved digitally, widely, that John and Joan Public simply never have to worry about. (nipple slip, porn tape, telling someone to eff off when they're having a bad day, tweeting something in haste like calling someone a creepy pedo, etc).

What if someone was formerly a neo-nazi, and they've spent the past decade fighting against hate (several of these types exist [4]) and living a completely different life? Should they not be allowed to bury their past and be judged on their current works instead of the foolish things they did in their youth?

[1] https://time.com/2982204/paul-mccartney-warren-buffett-selfi...

[2] https://money.com/a-billionaire-22-year-old-was-fined-30000-...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593

[4] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/578745514/a-former-neo-nazi-e...

tstrimple• 7 years ago

There is an article in the local newspaper about my brother being arrested for driving while intoxicated and being in possession of a controlled substance. He's certainly not a billionaire.

ryanmercer2• 7 years ago

In a local newspaper, not on a dozen tech/finance major publications with dozens of video clips talking about it from national and international broadcast outlets.

Reporting crimes in newspapers at varying levels has existed effectively as long as newspapers as they were a convenient means of notifying the public of happenings. That's why you still have to publish certain things in newspapers in many states, like when you want to change your name (for something other than marriage/divorce) so companies/persons you might be trying to hide from (for non-life or death situations like a battered spouse) have a reasonable chance of detecting an attempted evasion.

What about when your brother buys ice cream? I bet he doesn't make international news within hours, that then gets talked about for months by radio/tv/online news/blogs/reddit/twitter/etc.

I bet when he flies somewhere he doesn't have paparazzi waiting for him at the airport to take his photo, or people waiting to shove merchandise at him to sign (this happens to a lot of famous people, people find out they're coming in on a flight via various means and are waiting at the airport to try and get merch/photos signed that they then go attempt to sell).

There is a world of difference between public notice of a DUI and international press coverage before charges are even filed.

I'm not justifying the example case listed in the article, but put yourself in the shoes of someone that has used one of these services. Are you telling me, that if your brother could write a check and make any public record of his DUI outside of a law enforcement system vanish, that he wouldn't? (also, you gave a bad example as DUIs can be expunged in many states under various conditions and a random newspaper article about him, if even found, would be dismissed by any employer/lender/investigator when they ran his record and found it if he had it expunged and if he didn't have it expunged they'd find it anyway).

If an ex-girlfriend accused him of something, I bet it never left facebook. It would likely stay in the post and get ignored by a few people, a few people would take her side and believe her, and that would be that. It would be lost to time next to impossible to find in a feed. But what if a major business person is accused (falsely, which is later verified as false). Guess what, there are gonna be tons of articles that stay high in search results, there might never even be an article "the accuser admitted they lied, they wanted attention and money, they have a history of accusing people".

_emacsomancer_• 7 years ago

E.g. Bill Gates: https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so-be...

Animats2• 7 years ago

Is there a site which finds the whitewashing articles and collects them?

I used to work the conflict of interest noticeboard on Wikipedia. There are at least four rich ex-convicts with paid staff trying to whitewash their articles on Wikipedia.

njharman• 7 years ago

Google search

gdsdfe• 7 years ago

Wait, how is this bad?

shaneprrlt5• 7 years ago

Mr. Gottlieb said in an interview with the Journal that he found his press coverage unfair and wanted to fight back.

Favorable opinions and professional character praises are not the same as fake news as in conspiracy theories and outright lies. Really, this is just criticizing people for acting in their own rational self-interest to protect their reputation.

Idk, I guess you could make the valid criticism that this is bad practice because this is a privilege only the wealthy and influential have, but I'd argue that is (in most instances) the only class of people who likely have to deal with a barrage of negative news coverage to begin with.

Which begs the question: do wealthy and influential people have the capacity to reform their behavior, and are we willing to let people make mistakes and try again in life? If the answer is yes, then clearly they need some recourse against the astronomical influence of online search results and social media.

Wish the masses were just as open to forgiving people as they are for grabbing the pitchforks and torches.

ydb• 7 years ago

but I'd argue that is (in most instances) the only class of people who likely have to deal with a barrage of negative news coverage to begin with.

They experience a barrage of negative press because they deserve it. The ultra-wealthy of the world (I'm not talking SV tech salaries, those are practically working class in comparison) are the ones doing the majority of harm to this pale blue dot we all have to live on. Climate catastrophe is well on its way to undermining society, and it could have easily been addressed decades ago if the ultra-wealthy weren't Biblical levels of greedy.

shaneprrlt5• 7 years ago

They experience a barrage of negative press because they deserve it.

Ah, how could I forget, humans are one-dimensional cartoon characters and moral complexity is tossed out the window the moment you own a certain amount of property.

save_ferris5• 7 years ago

Status Labs posted content on this site to improve the profile of their client:

http://medicaldailytimes.com/

That site is in no way legitimate in its construction or messaging. It makes no mention that it's run by Status Labs, or NOT run by a legitimate medical reporting outlet. Why obfuscate the true governance of such an online property? Why are there zero contributors listed in the masthead or contributors page?

How on earth do you look at this website and think "yeah, they're just trying to help the defenseless welathy"?

shaneprrlt5• 7 years ago

How on earth do you look at this website and think "yeah, they're just trying to help the defenseless wealthy"?

That's a bit of a straw man. 1) I don't think that, 2) I never said they were defenseless. Clearly they are capable of defending themselves.

My entire point is that people, all people, outside of obvious outliers like people who commit extreme violence, are capable of changing their behavior for the better and should have the opportunity for a second chance, and since socially there really isn't one, I understand why they take these measures.

lordnacho2• 7 years ago

Really, this is just criticizing people for acting in their own rational self-interest to protect their reputation.

Yes but normally we limit people's self-interest when it harms other people, and it's totally legit to limit such behaviours by law. This is no different from why you can't just take people's stuff from their house. It's in your interest but not theirs.

Specifically, this harms other people who are interested in doing due diligence in Gottlieb. They are less likely to hear about his failed ventures, which is something people care about.

tehjoker3• 7 years ago

Rich and powerful people depend on us forgetting their crimes in order to continue to predate us. The moral rules are a bit different for the victims and the powerless.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera

mnm12• 7 years ago

I worked at a company that did this about ten years ago. This was the only thing in the entire playbook. They also wanted to create an alternative to the current FICO score based on their data, presumably a score that could easily be influenced and increased by paying more money. Nowadays, the business is very pedestrian. Half the Internet is posting lies and bullshit online these days. These guys have just been doing it longer and for more money than most.

jotato2• 7 years ago

10 years ago? Seattle? VT?

Would be a small world, if so

mnm12• 7 years ago

It was in the bay area.

supernova87a• 7 years ago

Not too different from a rich person hiring people to say flattering things in the press or basically paying journalists or subsidizing their access to favorable events to get positive coverage. Well, maybe amplified a bit more by the internet.

tyingq• 7 years ago

Another trick is using secondary meaning for words in your reputation management posts. So, if you were arrested, you post something like "John Doe Reviews TV Show Arrested Development"

Then, backlinks, and it ranks well for "John Doe Arrest".

cal5k• 7 years ago

Well, here's the broader question: why can't you, as an individual, opt out of showing up in Google search results altogether?

OJFord• 7 years ago

Why should you be able to?

A court may grant an injunction preventing publication of certain facts or identifying you in proceedings, but that's specific, why should it be possible to opt out of ever appearing?

And where would it end, because there's no reason for that not to be everyone's default position, but then if you run some business such that you need the exposure, you're going to want 'business-only' results.

Or do you mean that news would be allowed, it just wouldn't appear in search results? How would I find an article I recalled and wanted to revisit?

jotato2• 7 years ago

I worked at a startup in 2007 that did this. I didn't work on this product, but as far as I know, no "fake news" was ever posted. True stories and PR stuff was put out. The goal was to generate more "noise" then a bad article would and they would just disapear. Basically, standard SEO stuff everyone does.

_sbrk• 7 years ago

Sounds a lot like The Orville episode "Majority Rule".

allovernow• 7 years ago

I'm not surprised. With the cancer that is SEO, removal of advanced search features, and mandatory and aggressive fuzzy matching, Google search has been increasingly broken for years. It is technical-user hostile and arguably even average user hostile at this point.

Today I switched back to ddg after not using it for months, hopefully it's more mature now. This way at least I'm less likely to be tracked. I was tolerant of the privacy issues when the search results were good, because the power behind Google really is phenomenal, they had at one point achieved a truly marvelous technical feat. But now scrolling through two pages of ads on mobile only to find crappy matches from conceptually different synonyms is simply intolerable. I imagine they're using some sort of transformer/encoder and clearly the difficult problem of disambiguation is still not quite solved. We're going to come up on a similar problem soon at the startup I work for, but our domain is limited so it should be easier to constrain, but I digress...

It's a shame to watch Google search gradually ruined by revenue driven features.

malandrew3• 7 years ago

I'm actually okay with this development given that the media has devolved into an industry that manufactures villains for the sake of eyeballs and ad clicks.

milesward• 7 years ago

Heh, this article is 15 years late...

timcederman• 7 years ago

Boris Johnson's self-serve efforts are pretty interesting: https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1169719026060320768

firefoxd• 7 years ago

Same thing for Magic Leap. The billions of dollars in investment may not have given them the device they wanted, but it gave them the ability to bury all negative news.

For the longest time, it was impossible to find criticism that I had already read about the company. Try to look for the golem on google.

theblackcat2004• 7 years ago

Here in Taiwan we have agency that helps customer to bury your negative articles or reviews for as little as 1.6k USD. If you have more budget you can ask the media to remove your negative news coverage.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

In addition to the many pre-Web / pre-Internet variants of this, there is the established Web history of firms such as Reputation.com (previously: ReptuationDefender):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation.com

Reputation management firms bury Google results by placing flattering content

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