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Call centre workers and trainee lawyers turning to reputation management companies to clean up digital past

Reputation management companies told the Telegraph they had seen a huge rise in ordinary people turning to them to clean up their digital pasts - E+
Reputation management companies told the Telegraph they had seen a huge rise in ordinary people turning to them to clean up their digital pasts - E+

Call centre workers and trainee lawyers paying are online reputation management firms to stop them being rejected from jobs.

Leading sources in the industry have told the Sunday Telegraph it is experiencing a boom as more and more ordinary people are paying to have past indiscretions and unflattering social media posts scrubbed from the internet.

The result is a burgeoning online sector now dedicated to trying to edit the first page of Google's results for their clients.

A decade ago, the services of reputation management companies were still the preserve of wealthy celebrities and corporations.

However, Alana Benson, business development manager three-year-old company DigitalOx, said it was increasingly dealing with individuals concerned their Google results could harm their job prospects.

She said: “There are two case walking through the door, first where there is no damage but they want to work in a high-profile industry such as barristers and lawyers.

“Then if they have ever been a named person for a company and dealt with customer complaints, it is very for them to get slagged off online. They are getting caught in the backlash of being a named person.”

The company’s services starts by attempting to have damaging posts or search results removed via social media companies’ and Google’s internal processes. If they cannot be erased, DigitalOx will then undertake a campaign to create positive content to crowd out the negatives and push them off the front page of Google.

“It is all about Google,” Ms Benson adds. “Something like 94 percent of people don’t move off page one.”

John Awen, a 50-year-old vegan and spiritualist author from Sommerset, used the companies services to remove blogs he said were making false personal accusations that he said affected his book sales.

Author John Awen turned to DigitalOx reputation management after anonymous blogs made false accusation that affected his career - Credit: John Awen
Author John Awen turned to DigitalOx reputation management after anonymous blogs made false accusation that affected his career Credit: John Awen

He said: “It was keyboard warrior trolls who were putting this stuff up and sharing it on social media. People read it and some people believe it and for three years I didn’t know what to do. It was horrendous.”

There is already a well-established industry aimed at getting certain companies or websites to rank as high up in Google’s search results as possible. This is done by techniques known as search engine optimisation (SEO), and which involve making sure websites have key words included, link to other credible or relevant sites and have an established audience.

Simon Leigh, director of London-based Pure Reputation, describes his company’s services as “SEO backwards”, essentially de-ranking negative results by making positive ones more interesting to Google’s algorithm.

Among the diverse set of clients to have used his services are a member of the House of Lords, a daytime TV presenter and an African ‘prophet’ and televangelist.

“We get the negatives off the front page,” said Mr Leigh. “We take all the positive stuff and put it to the top. We are like their propaganda minister.”

Mr Leigh says that the process takes a gradual campaign of building new websites and optimising existing ones over six months to a year so that process appears more organic to Google's algorithm. He said Pure Reputation can also hire another company to direct traffic to their sites to make them more credible to Google.

Google told the Sunday Telegraph it was aware of reputation management companies.

A spokesman said: “We all want to be able to find accurate information online.”

Yet it is not just damage control that people are turning to reputation management companies for. Simon Wadsworth, founder of Igniyte in Leeds, said he was increasingly seeing leaders in industries such as oil, gas and pharmaceuticals asking him to fashion a digital profile befitting of the high-status roles they have or seek.

“You have the ones who have shunned online and that’s a big problem as well,” said Mr Wadsworth

“If I am applying to be a digital marketer and I have got no presence online what does that say about me? A lot of what we do is building reputations rather than trying to clean things up.”

This process leads to clients paying retainers of between £1,000-a-month to more than £10,000 while his company creates websites and content that burnish their digital reputations.

And for Igniyte business is booming. Mr Wadsworth said: “I get enquiries every day of the year, including Christmas Day, and over the last few years I would say they have tripled.”