Calling In Pros to Refine Your Google Image
At the height of the cyber-abuse, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, would type her name in a Google search box and brace herself: Up would pop page after page of attack postings. … The stream of negative comments began …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Forbes asked in late May 2007 whether public relations could ever be Google-proof, it was framing an open question about search-driven reputations. Sue Scheff's case supplies the answer in the affirmative-with-a-price-tag: facing pages of attack postings that dominated results for her name, she hired professional consultants to refine what searchers found.
That move matters because it treats Google's results not as a neutral record but as something an individual can pay to edit — converting a search engine into contested terrain where victims of coordinated abuse bid against their attackers for ranking.
First-order effects
- Scheff's consultants are now running an active optimization campaign to push attack postings off the first pages of results for her name, making her one of the earliest named private individuals to buy search-results remediation rather than simply endure the abuse.
Second-order effects
- PR and SEO firms gain a new customer class beyond corporations — defamed individuals — which forces pricing and service models built around suppressing specific negative URLs rather than promoting positive ones.
Third-order effects
- If paid suppression becomes the standard remedy, the burden of dealing with search-based abuse shifts from Google's ranking policies to victims' wallets, building pressure on Google to address manipulated or abusive results in its own algorithm instead.
The trend: Search results are hardening into de facto identity records, and a paid reputation-management industry is forming to arbitrate who controls them.