I'm a huge fan of defense. I always find myself cheering for teams that play great defense. I draft defensive players in my fantasy football league much earlier than I probably should. My favorite college football player is Charles Woodson. And so, in the spirit of great defense, I want to discuss playing professional reputation defense online.

I was recently contacted by a fellow law firm web visibility consultant who had a client with a problem. She, an attorney, had represented a woman in a divorce proceeding. For whatever reason (presumably sour grapes), her client's husband decided to launch an online attack. He set up a free google site and opened an adwords account. He targeted her name and ran an ad saying something to the effect of before you hire so and so, read my story. On his site he explained why this attorney was so terrible.

Now you might be thinking, hey this is great publicity for her. If her client's adversary despises her so much, she must be doing something right. In any case, the site said some less than flattering things about this attorney and so she went to her web strategist to talk about some ways that she could diminish the impact of the ad. Here were a couple ideas:

• Run a counter ad pushing his ad down.
• Complain to Google to remove the ad.

Needless to say, each of these methods isn't without limitation. In fact, in my experience, getting Google to remove an ad is a painstaking process that takes a long time, if you they are willing to do it at all.

But Adwords ads aren't the only reputation defense problem that legal professionals may face online. As attorney Lee Rosen points out in Can You Get a Bad Review Removed from Google?, review sites, including Google Places, can present reputational issues for attorneys as well:

Let’s say a former client trashes you on your Google Places page. The client rips you a new one and tears you from limb to limb. Can you get Google to remove the review? What if it isn’t your client, but instead it’s your client’s spouse? Can you get Google to remove that review? Google says it “reserves the right to remove reviews that include any of the following:

 

Inappropriate content

We want to provide a clean and positive user experience for all users. We may remove reviews that contain or link to unlawful content, or content that violates our Google Places content policy. We may also remove reviews that include plagiarism or are copied from other sites.

Advertising and spam

Nobody likes spam and it can only make its author look bad. Don’t use reviews for advertising or post the same or similar reviews across multiple places. Obviously, don’t post fake reviews intended to boost or lower ratings.

Off-topic Reviews

Reviews should describe your personal, first hand experience with a specific place. Please do not post reviews based on someone else’s experience, or that are not about the specific place you are reviewing. Reviews are not a forum for personal attacks, rants or crusades. Please also do not use reviews to report incorrect information about a place — use the Report a problem link for that place instead.

Conflict of interest

Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. Even if well-intentioned, a conflict of interest can undermine the trust in a review. In addition, we do not accept reviews written for money or other incentives. Please also do not post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with the place you are reviewing.

From these guidelines, I would agree with Mr. Rosen that it seems that you may be able to get adversarial reviews removed. On the other hand, guidelines don't always equate to action.

For example, we recently had a client who had received spam reviews that had been posted on several other attorney place pages as well. We submitted our request to have the spam removed. After several weeks, the review was finally taken down.

As these issues become more an more prevalent, I have no doubt that review sites will become more active in addressing them.