IBTimes.com

With the rise of the Internet, businesses and individuals have discovered that their image and bottom-line is more susceptible than ever to public opinion. Information such as independent websites and third-party reviews, both negative and positive, can be readily submitted and accessed on an international scale -- and manipulated just as easily.

We've known for over a decade that many companies' fortunes are heavily dependent upon online visibility, and increasing Google page ranking in particular has been the goal for last decade's boom in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. While the ranking criteria is a well-kept secret, SEO professionals have been relatively successful at reverse-engineering the process -- for better or worse; Google itself has been forced to revise the method a number of times to combat artificially-manipulated results that fail to reflect the objective importance or usefulness of the website in question.

A similar pattern emerges in the relatively recent rise of online reputation management as an industry. Not restricted to the increasingly-saturated (and potentially outmoded) field of SEO, reputation management takes into consideration the overall visibility of its clients -- most notably, in the area of third-party and user-generated content.

Websites such as eBay, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and countless others have created and to a large part depend upon real-life, unsolicited opinions from users. A particular product, service, business, or company in general is often at the mercy of these opinions -- and perhaps rightly so, in a level playing field.

Predictably, the playing field is never level. For example, eBay's 'positive feedback' is so highly prized and jealously guarded that threats of negative feedback have been known to lower a seller's price dramatically. The theory, often confirmed, is that negative reviews far more likely to be accessed and taken into consideration than positive reviews -- and therefore, positive reviews must be provided and protected, and negative reviews removed or obscured at all costs. What goes for two- and three-figure Bay auctions goes all the more so for businesses whose costs are measured in millions or billions.

With online content protected as free speech by United States law, the legal recourse to unwelcome or destructive websites is severely limited except in clear cases of slander, libel, or copyright violation. However, third-party, user-generated posts are explicitly distinct from the legal liability of the website that hosts them -- one can request that eBay investigate misuse of feedback, for example, but in all but the most egregious of cases, the company has no legal obligation to remove the feedback.

Typically, by the time any such investigation or legal process is completed (especially in the case of sites such as eBay or Groupon, whose products are generally extremely time-sensitive), the feedback has done significant damage already...and if no such process is undertaken, the content can be accessed at will for the foreseeable future.

Such third-party systems virtually beg for abuse of a more widespread and systemic nature -- to the extent that individuals or groups motivated by marketing concerns or simple spite can conduct a campaign which completely invalidates the authenticity of the results.

Take, for instance, the example of Yelp, one of several yellow-pages websites that offer user-generated reviews of local businesses. In a recent NY Times article, the actual nature of the reviews of a particular dentist were investigated, confirming that many of the reviews had been solicited and paid for as part of an "experiment" by a reputation management company on the dentist's payroll.

Web-savvy users have been aware for some time that the opinions that they read are not always likely to come from objective and impartial sources, but it may be argued that such a critical approach is by no means widespread among Internet users. Online marketing and reputation management companies are thereby increasingly aware of such user-generated channels as a de facto tool to give clients the results that they desire.

James Phillips is a Senior Writer & Research Analyst for IBG.com. With offices in Dallas, Las Vegas, and New York, & London, IBG is quickly becoming the leading expert in Internet Marketing, Local Search, SEO, Website Development and Reputation Management. More information can be found at www.ibg.com.