It is much more expensive to bury your search engine results if your name is plastered on major sites, so you can pretty easily protect yourself in a couple of

It is much more expensive to bury your search engine results if your name is plastered on major sites, so you can pretty easily protect yourself in a couple of steps. Never fight a battle you don’t have to. From now on, pick a middle name, real or imaginary. Use this name on your resume, business social media accounts, Facebook, etc. Use your new full name on all the obvious social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, Google +). Then you get creative - leave reviews for books in your field on Amazon using your new full name, they always kill. Make a quora account with the name. Make a meet-up account with the full name, etc. This won't make it impossible to smear your search results, but it changes it from a couple $100 in outsourcing to a multi-thousand dollar a year project. Best advantage of this, it costs you almost nothing to change all of this to a new middle name if your enemy does spend the money. Spam anchor text can't be changed without doing the whole campaign again, even if they can change the smear websites, which many times they can't (since its published elsewhere).