Active / Defensive Reputation Management is when an entity is actively posting and refreshing negative information about a brand. It can also be when an antagonist performs search engine optimization on an existing negative posting.
Different than Passive / Defensive Reputation Management, Active/Defensive reputation problems occur when an attacker continues to post negative information - the freshness of the information makes reputation problem solving more of a challenge. Active/Defensive Reputation Management normally takes the form of blog posts or editorial comments. Freshness of content can have much the same effect as engaging in search engine optimization to make a negative search result rise.
Most often, the main difference between active and passive online reputation attack issues is how often information is refreshed. Google rewards frequently refreshed web content. Information that is less frequently updated may have less perceived relevance to search engines and require less resourcefulness to suppress.
Active/Defensive online reputation issues require more aggressive tools and techniques to suppress. If possible, the first step is to get the attacker to stop, but identifying the person or entity behind the issue often precedes an attempt to get them to stop. Often attackers will hide behind a shield of anonymity making them very difficult to find. Services like Googles Blogspot do not require bloggers to identify themselves.
Even if one can contact an anonymous attacker via email it may be inadvisable to do so. Putting oneself at the mercy of an anonymous attacker can have messy results. We have seen peoples emails and postings to anonymous attackers used to fuel the flames of the reputation problem. Excerpts from emails that are taken out of context are often added to the existing negative information by the attacker. The information is refreshed, additional keywords are added to the negative posts and search engines reward the refreshed information with higher rankings. What was meant to put an end to the problem can end up compounding the online reputation problem.
Legal remedies to online reputation problems can be problematic as well. Most people cannot afford the legal fees associated with first unmasking an anonymous attacker, and then attempting to get the posts removed. Even if the posts are eventually 'removed' they may never truly be gone. The nature of search engine spiders is that they crawl the web taking what amounts to snapshots of pages at a specific point in time. Search engine spiders (often called 'bots') are resident not only on the web, but on your local computer as well. For example, Google Desktop stores cached 'snapshots' of web pages visited on the users hard drive. Someone reading a blog post automatically has a copy of it stored on their system. The post, even if removed by the attacker, can resurface on the web at any time in the future.
The solution to Active/Defensive online reputation problems may be dilution of first page search results by creating specific types of online content that can be refreshed often. The content can be controlled and refreshed as needed. Search engine optimization is then applied to the web sites to increase their perceived relevance to search engines. Finally, a schedule of content creating is initiated to refresh the content regularly. Over time the combination of relevant sites, fresh content, and search engine optimization can muscle the negative posts off the first page of search results.
The perfect solution would involve using a time machine to stop the perpetrator from ever posting the negative information; oftentimes management of the problem is the best solution when eradication isn't possible.