Defensive reputation issues often take the form of negative reviews, blog comments, court documents, or journalism. The difference between an active reputation problem and a passive one is whether it is happening now, or is a lingering problem from the past.
Techniques for meeting this search engine reputation management problem differ in the type of new web content created, the content update schedule, and the amount of resources required to solve the problem. This is because the passive nature of the content tends not to rise in search results as aggressively as more active problems.
Passive/Defensive reputation problems are often solved by both the creation of new content that can be updated as needed, and by identifying existing third-party neutral or positive web content that can be made to seem more relevant to search engines. Today, search results are a mixture of different kinds of media. Press releases, web sites, blogs, video, and social media (like Twitter and Facebook) are all mixed together on a search engine results page (SERP). By creating the right mix of media types, with carefully written and refreshed content, the important first pages of search result pages can be diluted or even dominated by neutral and positive search results.
