Online allegations of an affair by soccer’s Ryan Giggs sparked panic in three celebrities who wanted bad news suppressed.

Photograph by: CARL DE SOUZA, AFP/Getty Images

Celebrities, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide their secrets and damaging press stories in Google search results.

Online “reputation management” agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings. They typically use thousands of social networking profiles — set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person — to talk about and link to more positive results, pushing them above the negative stories.

The agencies do not identify their clients for fear of undoing the work they have carried out, but an investigation by The Times has discovered several cases.

Three public figures in Great Britain — an author and a Conservative politician, both of whom had extramarital affairs, and a married actor who paid a prostitute for sex — have approached agencies in the past week to help to keep their identities secret.

A further three — two actors and a prominent sportsman — have paid up to the equivalent of $16,000 a week to use the services in the past six months.

Woburn Safari Park, an hour north of London and owned by the Duke of Bedford, used an agency to hide press accounts of a damning government report that alleged animal mistreatment.

Google uses a complicated algorithm taking into account dozens of criteria to rank results for a search term, but one of the key factors is the number of links a web page has from other websites.

The Times, London

Reputation management agencies work to improve the popularity of positive or irrelevant results, pushing them above those that are negative.

As more than 90 per cent of users look only at the first Google results page, and only a tiny fraction go beyond the third page, well-hidden results are seldom read.

Chris Angus, the 30-year-old founder of Warlock Media, confirmed that the company had recently been employed by two actors and a sportsman who had been granted injunctions, charging between $8,000 and $16,000 a week.

He said that his work had been “incredibly successful,” adding: “If you put their names into Google, you won’t find reference to their injunctions. You can’t stop an event happening, but you can stop it being seen. You can make sure that, if it does appear in Google or Twitter, it is completely suppressed and crushed.”

Chris Emmins, co-founder of Kwikchex, said he had been approached in the past week by three celebrities who panicked after seeing how quickly soccer star Ryan Giggs’s name had been spread online because of allegations of an extramarital affair.

The company turned down the work “on principle,” but the three men — an actor, an author, and a Conservative politician — all wanted to stop the fact they had obtained injunctions over affairs being spread online.

Tourist attractions are particularly susceptible to damaging press reports and reviews online.

In June last year, several newspapers published stories about Woburn Safari Park, in Bedfordshire, reporting the results of an inspection by government vets.

A few weeks after the stories were published, the park hired the services of Keith Griggs, who runs ReputationManagement.me. On his website, he described how he started worked for “a wildlife park” in July last year, when three of the first 10 search results for the park were news articles about the allegations. Within a week there were no longer any links to critical stories on the first page of results. A few months later there was only one negative report in the first five pages of search results. The case study has now been taken off-line.

Griggs, 52, said that he offered a service to companies and individuals who understood that “it takes many good deeds to build a reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”