[GCA10]

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.

[mikestew]

And you didn't reply to their comments with, "Thanks for the compliment. Oh, BTW, that doesn't mean I've forgotten about http://newsite.com/StoryAboutBadThingsYouDid.html" to skew the Google stats?

Of course you didn't, because that would be mean, yet oddly satisfying.

[nerfhammer]

> Why would someone be writing "Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m?

I always thought these were linkspam bots, hoping to get a little pagerank from the url they submit with their name

[GCA10]

Them, too. The amount of false flattery in the world is really getting out of control.