Can SEO Be Used as a Weapon?

According to a recent Wired article, yes, it can. 

In the article, author David Kravets points to a website called florida.arrests.org, which functions solely for the purpose of posting Florida mug shots (available via public record, thanks to Florida’s liberal transparency laws), and generates revenue from the Web traffic and resulting advertising. 

Kravets tells the story of Philip Cabibi, a 31 year-old Florida man who sat down one evening to perform a ritual familiar to most of us in the digital generation: “the ego search” or “googling oneself.” You can imagine Mr. Cabibi’s dismay when he realized that a drunk driving arrest from 2007 had come back to haunt him in the form of his mug shot on page one of his search results, thanks to florida.arrests.org.

But the real star of the story is the rise of “reputation management” companies in recent years to help people remove... or at least better hide those proverbial skeletons in the closet on the Web. For a price, of course. In the case of Cabibi, he discovered a company called RemoveSlander.com that promised to remove him from florida.arrests.org within one day – for just $399 (the price has been raised to $699 since the Wired article).

The kicker? Kravets was able to discern that this was done through a back-end deal with florida.arrests.org for a fee of $19.90, working out to more than a 4000 percent profit margin. Not too bad for a few minutes worth of work. 

Let us state for the record that not all reputation management companies are scam artists. Some provide genuine services, which help individuals ensure they are portraying their best self on the Internet. But this story exposes the dirty side of SEO – not “black hat” exactly – but something more personal.

To be fair to the state of Florida, the government probably passed transparency laws with the best of intentions, Instead, individuals are being publicly haunted by mistakes made in their past. I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of drunk driving, but in Cabibi’s case, does he deserve to have that mistake follow him on page one of his “ego search?” And what about cases of wrongful arrest – aren’t we essentially slapping innocent people with a stigma that could hurt their chances of getting a job, among other consequences?

With SEO now playing an increasingly prominent role in how we are perceived online, educating yourself on how it works is paramount. Whether ensuring the sites you want are in the top 10 search results for your name (Journalistics recently wrote a great blog post on this) – or arming yourself with the information necessary to get unflattering information removed from sites without spending hundreds of dollars – knowledge is power.

Devin Davis can be reached at ddavis@sterlingpr.com. Follow him on Twitter @DevinDavis.

Image via ibizclicks.com.

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