It’s not until you’re in a situation where someone is attacking your honor where you realize that Google has a lot of power over what others think of you and your company.  Here is an example one company, absolutepoker.com which literally got devastated by other a few people who were very mad at them.  They decided to advertise under their name to get top placement for their absolutepokercheats.com site and the following is what happened.

This was quickly becoming a public relations nightmare.  So what can you do when something like this happens?  Well, in the world of SEO, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the damage immediately.  It comes down to pulling down the value of the page or bringing up the value of your pages so that the listing gets pushed off of the first page.

But this is only part of the solution.  In an ideal situation, you will have proactively spent resources in making sure that anything listed under your name or company are high ranking pages that YOU control. That means that it becomes very difficult for someone to get themselves associated with your company that you don’t want, but more importantly, you can respond to threats to your reputation because you have a number of strategically placed pages where you can do damage control.  Online reputation management is quickly becoming a new essential tool for public relations and media management.