I've recently been hearing radio ads for Reputation defender (ReputationDefender), which has made one big splash of which I'm aware with its involvement in the Catsouras nightmare (see link in Wikipedia doc).

Does anybody know whether this company's claims that it can clean up a person's Internet "face" are, in fact, justified (and whether a cleanup can be accomplished for a non-prohibitive amount of money)?

This post was prompted by kevs's "What do you think of the ton of complaint sites now on the internet which allow people to post anonymous and often fabricated complaints against small businesses?
This issue for me is even more pernicious. They hide out behind their proxy web hosters, and you cannot get the slander removed. its just sits there for you potential clients to judge you by." (Here)

Wow. I see I'm in the wrong damn business. $599 a year for writing a lot of chaff about a company or a person and splattering it all over the Internet? Man, I need a new career!

I suspect a lot of their claims are likely bunk. A Google search for the word Catsouras comes up with a very large number of hits, most of them negative and many of them downright gruesome. If the Catsouras family is a satisfied customer, I'd sure hate to see what a dissatisfied customer looks like!

Just for curiosity's sake, I did a Google search for Reputation defender, to see if they were effective at making their own Web presence positive. The first page of hits is the Wikipedia article (of course) and several links to their Web site. The second page of hits has several negative links.

There's little that they or anyone else can actually do. Their blog says that they remove negative information from the Web by doing Google searches, then emailing the Webmasters of people who host negative content asking that it be removed and/or threatening legal action if it's not. They will not, however, do anything about press stories or Wikipedia content, and legal threats are ineffective against content hosted in any countries outside the US. On top of that, truthfulness is a bulletproof defense against legal claims of slander or libel in the US, so the odds that they can actually use legal pressure to coerce bad publicity off the Web are slim.

The best they can hope to do is flood the Web with so much chaff that the negative stuff gets buried. And frankly, I'm skeptical about that.

Thanks... I was hoping for your response/analysis.

You've confirmed my reaction to Reputation Defender's ads...that they're pretty much selling pie-in-the-sky.

A suite of services (Products for Online Reputation Management) comprising

• Upgraded web presence
• Optimized Web properties
• Professionally written bios
• Promoted web content
• Negative content de-emphasis

for $599/year, and note that the spec is "Negative content de-emphasis," not removal, sounds more like a scam than the "savior" as which RD is being presented and has been reviewed.