Can you control your online reputation?

There is a big business around reputation companies and specialists (online image fixers, if you wish) who offer to push down unfavorable search results, populate the Web with favorable content and monitor clients’ virtual image.

So when anyone Google your name, the negative sites will be buried about six or seven pages in.

Online makeovers like Reputation.com, Big Blue Robot and Metal Rabbit Media agree that social networks, online comments and oversharing online have created a threat to everyone’s reputation and privacy.

Main problem is that images, blog posts, commentary, status updates and photos posted on the Web are easily replicated by algorithms and search engines, and dissipate like a virus.

Fixing tactics involve:

• Setting up new Web sites or blogs
  
  
• Signing up for popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
  
  
• Tricking the search engines creating dummy Web sites.
   
• Contacting Web masters and bloggers asking that the specific items be removed by appealing to their sense of fairness. 

The NYT wrote recently that corporations, celebrities, politicians and high-level executives might pay for an online makeover program between $5,000 and $1,0000 a month.