Knoxville business aims to make a change!

The Internet offers excellent cover for people to spread information that can damage the reputations of companies and individuals without having to answer for it, according to Scott Scheinbaum, who is offering a service to mitigate that damage. Companies and individuals can suffer as a result and not even realize why, Scheinbaum said, which is why he has founded www.ReputationAngel.com in Knoxville, Tennessee.

"A lot of times people just aren't aware it's happening because they are busy running a business and Googling themselves is way down on their list of priorities," said Scheinbaum, chief operating officer of the upstart firm.

So, his company will do it for them. ReputationAngel.com offers 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week monitoring of what kinds of information is turning up about a client online, and if a problem is detected, it will take steps to deal with it. For the most part, this means some positive information about the client online in a way that search engines will rank it higher and push the negative information lower in search results.

One www.ReputationAngel.com client is a technology company. Scheinbaum found that when a search was done on the company, it produced press releases and financial statements from the company's website, but these were ranked lower than a couple of negative reviews of the company's products. Scheinbaum produced some new content better tailored to match the criteria search engines use to rank Web pages.

"We take the positive content and help it become more visible, and as we do that, the negative results go further down on the search listings," he said. Pushing negative content further down is important, because about 95 percent of people will not bother to go past the first page of results and about 99 percent will not go beyond the second page, he said.

"I don't want to benefit anybody who has done something against the law or harmed someone, but there are a lot of legitimate, honest, ethical businesses out there that have had some bad things said about them and need my help," he said.

In May, Scott Scheinbaum started www.ReputationAngel.com, with business partner Doug Lane, sharing over 48 years of combined experience in information technology hardware and security.