In this day and age where anything can be found with a quick Google search, protecting your online reputation has become a major task.

As graduates of the MySpace, Facebook and online blog generation are finding out, their online personas can affect future employment opportunities. Millersville University in Pennsylvania denied Stacy Snyder her teaching certificate because of a photo on her MySpace page. The photo showed her drinking from a plastic cup in a pirate hat with the caption "Drunken Pirate". Snyder has filed a lawsuit against the school saying that they violated her first amendment rights.

The Snyder case demonstrates the need for the new industry that has risen up, online PR firms. These companies work to push bad information onto back pages of search engines like Google. This is done by creating hundreds and even thousands of links between third party sites and positive content about you. These services cost about $4,000 to $30,000 and it takes about six month to see results.

ReputationDefender, one of the online PR firms, goes about removing offending material in an easier and less-expensive way. They track down the host of the offending postings and ask that they remove the information. ReputationDefender charges a small monitoring fee and then $30 per item repaired.

With the advent of these methods for cleaning up your reputation the question than becomes ethical. Who deserves to have their reputation cleared and is it okay to bury news stories that paint their clients in an unflattering light? These are just some of the questions that are being worked through as this new industry of reputation repairmen emerges. One company, ReputationHawke, only takes on clients that have received negative publicity that is either outdated or falsely created. "Some people have made their bed and need to sleep in it." Chris Martin, founder of ReputationHawk, said in a Newsweek article. As for the industry it has been left to regulate itself for now.

These reputation repairmen are really the only recourse that people have to clearing their name online. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides immunity to site hosts so that they are not responsible for what users post on their sites. It is often difficult to track down anonymous web posters and even if the negative post comes from the hosts themselves it can be even more costly to drag the cases into court.