If you could go back in time and talk to shopkeepers and handymen of yore about “online reputation management,” you would quickly earn a reputation of your own: as the town crazy person.
But even if you went back 10 years, people probably still wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
Until fairly recently, online reputation management was an umbrella term that could include any number of shady practices: Bribing bloggers to write about you, paying SEO companies to manipulate your website’s ranking or bury negative feedback, buying fake reviews for your Yelp page: businesses tried them all in the Wild West era of internet commerce (aka the ’00s).
But as consumers and search engine designers have gotten savvier, those questionable practices don’t work so well anymore. Today, it’s nearly impossible to hide or cover up a bad reputation.
