This article is about the importance of having a great Internet Attorney.

I have one, and he is my friend and an outstanding Internet Attorney that has done wonderful work that protects me and helps me grow our business. His name is Charles Carreon, and I highly recommend him based on the merit of his outstanding work.

I can tell you from personal legal experience and several law suits I have had to file, that this is a "Pay me a smaller amount now, or Pay a big old bag of money later" proposition.

We know you think you are saving money by not hiring a Lawyer to take care of this, then years later when you are in a law suit you wish you would have listened to previous good legal advice and properly protected your Internet assets...

You want and need an Attorney that has many years of strong experience doing this, and Charles Carreon is this type of Attorney.

Today a hot topic of Law and SEO is the strange and difficult issue of reputation management. How do we know what to believe on the Internet when we have sites like RipOffReport and Yelp, etc.

I have talked and emailed with Ed the owner of RipOffReport, and even though his believes and morals on this topic are different then mine and frankly Ed's position (the owner of RipOffReport) upsets me. He is a very clever guy with a good team of Attorneys that fight everyone as long and as hard as they can so he does not give out any information about who files the reports.

This is where you need a good Attorney if a lot of money is on the line and you need to legaly force RipOffReport to disclose information about who really wrote the complaints. It will cost you at least $20,000 and most likely much more to prove who wrote something negative and false about your company, and then to take them to Court and collect will cost even more money, at least $50,000.

So this is not an inexpensive endeavor, it is less expensive to hire a good SEO company to push down the negative and perhaps false articles and complaints. This can also work the other way, you can push up negative complaint articles about your competitors if you so desire.

@joshuatopolsky that was a story we linked out to on huffpost to drive traffic/readers to The Verge, which it looks like it did 1/2

— Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) January 23, 2013

it would be absurd for a restaurant to tax a cab driver for taking tourists to eat there.

It's now a luxury for a reporter to write a story about an obscure but important topic. That used to be a job requirement. Now it's a career risk.

Example: let's say an interesting startup has a new and different idea. Many reporters now won't touch it because (a) the story won't generate page views, and (b) few people search on terms germane to that startup. Potential SEO performance is now a key factor in what gets assigned.

Two reporters from two different publications this month both told us the same thing: if you want to write a story on an interesting but obscure topic, you had better feed the beast by writing a second story about the iPad or Facebook or something else that delivers page views and good SEO.

The keyword and ad-stuffed dead end pages apparently produced by Perfect Markets's technology are isomorphic, from a search company's point of view, to those created by more questionable tactics such as scraping. The intent is the same: to spam the index. This is the behavior that routinely gets questionable sites shoved to Google's back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because it's being practiced by a recognized media outlet.

Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising.

No newspaper editor of any quality would allow an external interest to walk into their newsroom and demand to know exactly how to guarantee a front page article about whatever they want. But that's what the Italian papers seem to desire. Google has an editorial process for producing rankings, one that's done using automation -- but the papers seem to want to bypass those editorial decisions.

You want an algorithm, here it is:
1.) Sites that are useful to visitors will rank high.
2.) Popular sites that are useful to visitors will rank higher.
3.) Sites that don't offer any value to the web or are irrelevant to the query won't rank well.
4.) Sites that are harmful or spammy won't be included in the index.

Seriously, that's Google’s algorithm in plain English. There's your disclosure. The weighting factors and code behind it don't matter -- these principles are all you really need to know.