Let’s say someone writes a scathing indictment of you or your company. Very possibly, anyone searching for your name will find those negative comments. Bad news!

Online reputation management companies work to minimize the impact of those negative reviews (seldom can you get them completely removed) by creating optimized positive content that will show up higher than the negative content. Push it down far enough and few if any people will ever see it.

Of course those concerned with ethical SEO discourage anything you do just for the search engines and that’s not useful to searchers. So will this tactic cause you trouble with the search engines? At Google, apparently not. Recently on NPR’s All Tech Considered, it was remarked that:

Google doesn’t seem to have a problem with the whole game [search suppression]. As the world’s largest search engine, a spokesman there says creating new content to hide negative material is fair play.

Google’s own post on this reinforces that position:

For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.

Note that they specify useful information. Don’t just publish optimized garbage and expect it to do well. But if you generate useful content, it shouldn’t get you in trouble with Big G.

Just for fun … I stumbled upon a page that allows you to tailor an old photo of Albert Einstein by adding your own graffiti to his blackboard. If you’d like to try it for yourself, here it is.

Subscribers to the Windows Secrets Newsletter were asked to scan their computers using the Software Inspector, a service of Secunia.com. The scan reveals versions of Windows and builds of applications that have security flaws for which a vendor patch is available.

1. Adobe Flash Player 9.x
2. Sun Java JRE 1.6.x/6.x
3. Macromedia Flash Player 6.x
4. Macromedia Flash Player 8.x
5. Macromedia Flash Player 7.x
6. Apple QuickTime 7.x
7. Macromedia Flash Player 5.x
8. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.x
9. Macromedia Flash Player 4.x
10. Adobe Reader 7.x

Now that everyone uses the Web, people are learning to use it to their advantage to disparage those they’re got a grudge against. On the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, they talk about a web site put up by Charlie Harper’s jilted girlfriends, at www.CharlieHarperSucks.com.

All the search engine optimization in the world won’t help your business if you don’t follow through. Traffic is the end product of SEO. Converting that traffic to sales is the responsibility of your web site … and YOU. Read these sad excerpts from the newsletter of Softcast Marketing, a terrific paid search consultant I know:

We lost a client recently because our client told us they had not closed a single deal as a result of the work we did for them. They were a large networking company and if they had even closed a single client, it would have more than made up for the modest cost of their campaign. We monitored their account and we knew they were getting leads. We asked about their follow up. Their response was shocking. If leads came in via the telephone and a rep happened to be around (which was seldom) the lead would be answered. If not, it was written down and put into a drawer. Leads that came in from forms or emails were sent to a data file but they had not assigned lead follow up duties to any specific employee. As a result most leads were followed up days later or not at all!

…

If you get a lead the strategy should be to stop the prospect from searching. If you don’t follow up quickly, the prospect will find somebody else and your hard work and advertising budget will have been wasted.

You’ll find their full newsletter here.

Symantec said in its latest Internet Security Threat Report, for the period of July through December 2006, that the access to essential details about a person’s identity could be had for a low price of $14.

The myriad threats posed by online criminals became worse as they have started to organize in ways that would make the old Mafia proud. Bugsy Siegel had nothing on the crooks working in concert to steal financial information.

<More from SecurityProNews.com>

Sometimes it can be a challenge to send large files as email attachments. Many mail servers place limits on the size of attachments they will permit. Others will refuse certain file types, most notably executables. And sometimes even if you zip up an executable file to get past that barrier, the mail server may be wise to that trick and still forbid the attachment.

Senduit to the rescue. Here’s how it works: navigate to Senduit, find the file you want to share with someone, upload it, and then Senduit gives you a URL where your file can be accessed – that link goes inactive after 30 minutes unless you tell Senduit to keep it active for longer. Give the URL to the intended recipient and they can retrieve your file.

After Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced he’d be leaving the software giant in the next two years, night-time talk show host David Letterman created a “farewell video” of the famous übergeek.

The video didn’t go entirely smoothly, though. It has a few problems, known to one and all as Windows. The show aired a few weeks ago, but the clip is still hilarious. Watch the video.

Some people watch the Super Bowl mostly for the commercials. It’s well know for previewing many brand new and innovative spots. Well, Google has combined all of them onto one page so you can watch the ones you want — or even watch all of them one after another (takes about a half hour). Some are really funny. Check it out at video.google.com/superbowl.html

Some people apparently might add paint to their rooftops to advertise on Google Maps, silly as it sounds. The MIT Advertising Lab blog has a neat photo of a Target store with its logo largely emblazoned on its roof.