How To Clean Up Your Online Reputation

Messy party photos, offensive tweets, pepper spraying student protesters ... sometimes, you just want a do-over when it comes to your online presence. And for a hefty price tag, you can.

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The University of California, Davis is under fire for contracting consultants for at least $175,000 to clean up its online reputation after a November 2011 incident in which campus police pepper sprayed peaceful protesters, according to a report in the Sacramento Bee. If that PR campaign worked at all, it’s now backfired. Here’s how this sort of reputation scrubbing is supposed to help - and some ways in which it might have the opposite effect.

CALL THE PROS

Services such as Reputationdefender.com and Naymz.com offer to clean up your name, or, as the latter advertises, achieve your “professional and personal aspirations.” A company called ICMedia Direct advertises reputation control for $6,300, in which the service will try to “push down” your undesirable search results by populating Google with friendly links instead. These companies didn’t return messages seeking information about their services.