The saying that all publicity is good publicity is not strictly true. If a celebrity constantly has bad press, this will eventually have a negative effect on their reputation and the way they are perceived by the public. Everybody is allowed to make mistakes and most people understand that any mistake a celebrity makes will be magnified tenfold through the press. This does put a certain responsibility on them to behave in a certain way and many of them do but with the spotlight of the world's paparazzi constantly on them, impeccable behaviour is bound to slip occasionally. And why shouldn't they? They are only human after all.

However, when one of us minions slips up and has a drunken brawl in the street no-one takes a great deal of notice and we can still turn up to work the next day and earn the same amount of money - albeit a little sheepishly. It's a little different for those who people expect to see setting an example and continuous bad press can have disastrous effects on a career.

So, what can they do to counteract it? Given that a vast majority of the population will read the news online, particularly the people that matter, the celebrity's agents can contact a search engine optimization company and enlist their help for reputation protection. Online reports can be managed in such a way as to stop the bad news showing up first when a Google search is carried out on that particular person.

The mainstream users of search engines will rarely read past the first page and this is why search engine optimisation is such big business - everyone wants to be on page one for their key terms in order to generate the maximum amount of business from their website. So, in order to minimise the ill effects of bad publicity, high profile people will use search engine optimisation for reputation protection.

A thorough understanding of search engines and the way they work is crucial to managing an online reputation effectively. Software is available to try and cover it but each individual will need bespoke handling and software simply doesn't cover it. Software is useful for tracking the bad publicity but cannot do anything about where it appears in a search engine.

The saying that bad news travels fast is true. So, thanks to all the social networking sites and blogs that are now online, any bad news is quickly replicated and finds its way to the top of the search engine. Search engines love blogs because they are mostly text based and the information is relatively fresh most of the time so will spider them regularly.

A search engine optimisation company worth its money will show tact and discretion in counteracting the bad news with good news. The news will be optimised into a fashion that understands how search engines work and works within these boundaries. It's never going to be possible to take the bad news out but if you counteract it with enough good news that is search engine friendly then you can at least push the bad news back a page or two. As we have already established, most people only look at the first page of a search engine which means the chances of them seeing the bad news will be limited.