In an interesting article from a few weeks ago, The Daily Mirror asked this question: is the model Kate Moss using search engine optimisation techniques to banish any references to her alleged drug abuse from the first page of Google?

According to the Mirror, Moss is one of hundreds of celebrities who’ve paid thousands of pounds to SEO agencies to optimise the results returned from Google based on a query on their name.

The process – a combination of a various techniques including spamdexing, setting up link farms, keyword stuffing and other forms of SEO (search engine optimisation) – serves to push more negative search results off the first page of Google so they are less likely to be seen.

According to the article, former prime minister Tony Blair is also suspected of having invested in modifying the results returned by Google.

So why the interest in spending money of trying to change the order in which the world’s most popular search engine lists its results? The answer is that Google has become the first port of call for anyone gathering information on a given subject or person, including journalists who now extremely likely to run a search on it for the CEO they’re about to interview.

Today, Google provides a free reputational snapshot of any business or senior manager. As the world becomes more trusting of online research, so the order in which that information is presented to the searcher is growing in importance.

PR can also play a major role is affecting the Google search engine’s reporting of a company. The more press releases a business issues which can be found on its own website, the more these will show as positive news within the Google results. Issuing social media releases or web-optimised releases via online distribution services will also affect listings. Or, posting press releases onto free press release distribution sites will multiply the number of times a press release is picked up by Google.

At FWD, SEO and legitimate search engine results management are areas we’re extremely interested in and are working on now. Banks and insurers live or die by the strength of their reputations, as the recession has shown. Google presents a dynamic embodiment or snapshot of that reputation.

If you’d like to know more about what we’re doing, feel free to get in touch. Try googling your own name or that of your business and see what you get back.

Kate Moss has cleaned up her act - literally

Written by Adrian Beeby