The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#2Fascinating post. Reading about the somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites made me think there is a good business opportunity here automating the system -- not that I'm interested in pursuing it. I imagine the market for this service is very inefficient, as clients obviously don't like to talk about it and thus it is difficult to gauge quality.
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#3Fascinating post. Reading about the somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites made me think there is a good business opportunity here automating the system -- not that I'm interested in pursuing it. I imagine the market for this service is very inefficient, as clients obviously don't like to talk about it and thus it is difficult to gauge quality.
I can't conceive a way to decouple the client's name from the fraudulent information, it's all ultimately a cheap trick that will likely be automated to disregard.
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#4This is the relatively easily executed version of negative SEO: it's hard to negatively affect the SEO of a site, but easy to bury it with dozens of crafted pages - whether to hide an unfavorable result, or to discredit a competitor. $10,000 a month seems like an absurd number, but "reputation management" is a big business (albeit very quietly executed) and getting content on sufficiently high pagerank sites can be expensive.
If you look on sites like blackhatworld you'll find tons of people interested in services like this.
Seems like the business is booming, too: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reputation%20managem...
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#5Interesting story. I don't want to make any checks, but it seems the story itself could be false; in some way that's even more interesting. E.g. all the sites that are mentionned could exist, but have been created long ago to give this story credits.
This also makes me think to all those people that endorse me on linkedin, presumably so that I endorse them back.
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#6Fascinating post. Reading about the somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites made me think there is a good business opportunity here automating the system -- not that I'm interested in pursuing it. I imagine the market for this service is very inefficient, as clients obviously don't like to talk about it and thus it is difficult to gauge quality.
> somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites
Maybe it's my misplaced faith in human nature but I think this kind of thing is almost self-regulating.
> not that I'm interested in pursuing it
Exactly.
It's funny how money works. I'm sure there's a lot of HN users reading this thinking "well fuck that, ten grand a month!" I guarantee you that after 6 months 99% of those people would be looking at themselves and wondering what they were doing with their lives. Getting a bit of money saves you from the wolves at the door - bills, rent, worrying about what you buy. And then you're in your nice, warm, fully paid up home and you get to face the real monster - the mirror.(†)
Which is why these rich guys are paying through the nose for this nonsense in the first place, of course. Because that guy in the mirror is taunting them. Take money for doing something you know is wrong and he'll taunt you, too.
The thing is, though, you can have as many fake philanthropy sites as you want, but you can't fool that guy in the mirror.
(†) Or the whiskey bottle. Same thing really.
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#7I can't help but think that sounds like some fairly easy money.
Too bad I'd rather not help rich people that probably don't need the help, and likely need to know rich people to get into the market...
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#8This is the relatively easily executed version of negative SEO: it's hard to negatively affect the SEO of a site, but easy to bury it with dozens of crafted pages - whether to hide an unfavorable result, or to discredit a competitor. $10,000 a month seems like an absurd number, but "reputation management" is a big business (albeit very quietly executed) and getting content on sufficiently high pagerank sites can be e…
This is what HBGary did for the USG....
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#9Fascinating post. Reading about the somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites made me think there is a good business opportunity here automating the system -- not that I'm interested in pursuing it. I imagine the market for this service is very inefficient, as clients obviously don't like to talk about it and thus it is difficult to gauge quality.
There's also a business opportunity in automating the sleuthing out of this kind of site.
That might seem more legit but would also involve some creep factor.
Edit: that's assuming these sites actually help anyone. But that's as may-be.
Re: The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management
#10Interesting story. I don't want to make any checks, but it seems the story itself could be false; in some way that's even more interesting. E.g. all the sites that are mentionned could exist, but have been created long ago to give this story credits. This also makes me think to all those people that endorse me on linkedin, presumably so that I endorse them back.
CharityNewsForum.com was registered in September 2011...so it seems about right.