It's been a while since I've looked into these "reputation" services. Do they actually work, when not hit by the Streisand effect, or is it just snake oil?
The reputation services are actually rather entertaining to watch. I write a lot online, and a couple years ago, my older posts started attracting dozens of comments from a couple people who seemed to be in a frenzied hurry to get visible.
At first I couldn't figure out what was going on. Why would someone be writing "Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m.? Then I did a little checking on the names of the posters. Turns out they all had some "incident" in their pasts. Now they or their consultants were pumping out huge amounts of bland, benign content from all sorts of accounts (news sites, Tumblr, etc.) in their real names. The net result: these new accounts and the resulting content swamped Google, becoming the top 50 or so search results. The bad stuff didn't totally vanish, but it now was relegated to much lower placement.
In terms of whether this stuff works, that's a tricky call. I think it all depends on what the nature of the client's problems are ... and how much the world can/should care about some past mistake as life plays out. Sometimes it's hard to argue with the desire for a fresh start. In other case, it's hopeless.
My impression is that the more "reputable" such services have a series of steps that they take that could plausibly affect reputation. (E.g. "We monitor these sites for mentions of your firm; when negative reviews show up we work with you to overwhelm those with positive reviews.") It isn't clear that those steps do actually improve anything we could classify as "online reputation".
Anecdotal but from the various policies I've observed on my sites, a shill DMCA-like notice to remove content is often enough to get that content removed. A service that does nothing but send thousands of these to all top google searches would seem feasible and somewhat effective. Again the internet is not free if we use it as a collection of walled gardens.
I recommend "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. He had the opportunity to work fairly closely with one of these companies as they did some work for one of the people you likely remember making the social media crucifixion circuit a few years back for making a stupid joke at the wrong time.
As someone who works on conflict of interest problems on Wikipedia, coverups don't work if the incident got substantial press coverage or involved jail time. Small embarrassing problems can sometimes be pushed to the background.
There are at least four rich convicted felons who have Wikipedia articles and paid editors trying to whitewash them. They haven't succeeded.
As a Wikipedia reader, my favorite variation of that is when a nobody, some years before, has paid a firm to build up a Wikipedia biography, full of fluff accomplishments so-obscure-that-they're-probably-true, such as "Smith was nominated as Tuscon's Top 100 entrepreneurs Under 100 by TusconEntrepreneurXClub.com in 2012", and perfectly formatted and sourced in such a way that it can escape easy killing by a Wikipedia editor.
Years later, that obscure person gets caught up in an Internet-(infamous) scandal...and instead of just a bunch of self-made pages via LinkedIn, About.me, etc., that they can delete, they now have a suspiciously-seeming astroturfed Wikipedia entry with a prominent "Scandals/Controversy" subhead. And Wikipedia's pagerank being what it is...virtually no reputation-astroturf effort will overtake it.
At first I couldn't figure out what was going on. Why would someone be writing "Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m.? Then I did a little checking on the names of the posters. Turns out they all had some "incident" in their pasts. Now they or their consultants were pumping out huge amounts of bland, benign content from all sorts of accounts (news sites, Tumblr, etc.) in their real names. The net result: these new accounts and the resulting content swamped Google, becoming the top 50 or so search results. The bad stuff didn't totally vanish, but it now was relegated to much lower placement.
In terms of whether this stuff works, that's a tricky call. I think it all depends on what the nature of the client's problems are ... and how much the world can/should care about some past mistake as life plays out. Sometimes it's hard to argue with the desire for a fresh start. In other case, it's hopeless.