YOURS for a few thousand pounds: a freshly laundered online reputation.

Internet surfers suffering campaigns of written abuse and the dredging up of humiliating pictures from their past are being offered the opportunity to bury their embarrassment under reams of positive coverage.

The services ensure that only friendly entries appear on the first few pages of results when a client’s name is run through search engines such as Google.

Firms offering the services include Tiger Two and Distilled, based in London, and Reputation Defender, which has its offices in California but has taken on British clients.

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Michael Fertik, chief executive of Reputation Defender, said one of his clients was an academic psychologist in London anxious to “bury” the fact he had written about his own depression.

“Demand for the service is extremely high. Almost all our customers are private individuals and our top clients are high-pro-file business people,” said Fertik.

He charges $25,000 (£12,750) a year for his basic services, rising to £300,000 for the premium version.

Typical forms of online abuse – known as “trolling” or “flaming” – include the placing of compromising photographs on social networking sites such as Facebook. For many net surfers, typing their name into Google can yield pages of attacks on their integrity, professional skills or sexual prowess.

Sometimes abuse can be more serious, ranging from unsubstantiated criminal accusations to bogus obituaries of a victim’s child.

When words are typed into Google, the entries that show up on screen are usually ranked by the number of other sites that provide links to them. Negative coverage tends to attract more links, pushing it to the top of search results lists.

So-called reputation cleaners counteract this by creating numerous links to positive coverage of a person or business.

This weekend, for example, the first page of Google entries for the supermodel Kate Moss makes no mention of her being caught up in a cocaine-snorting scandal in 2005 – instead, it lists flattering profiles and the home page for her own clothes collection. Mentions of drugs do not appear until the top of the second page.

Shaun Parker, co-founder of High Position, a firm that improves clients’ profiles on search engines, said Moss’s Google results showed all the signs of having been laundered. “There is no doubt about it: this has been ‘done’,” Parker said. “It’s not a coincidence at all that the story about drugs is at the top of the second page.”

A spokesman for the supermodel declined to comment.

In addition to full cleaning services, firms offer more basic help from as little as £10 a month, such as tracking the use of a name online or providing monitoring services to parents to check their children’s MySpace and Facebook pages for the posting of inappropriate material.

Others will contact websites publishing defamatory material and ask them to take it down.

In theory internet users in Britain can sue website operators and internet service providers if libellous material is posted. But few cases have been successful and it often proves nearly impossible to trace who is responsible for particular sites.

With almost a billion Google searches made every day, alongside an estimated 1.6m blog postings, it is harder than ever for internet surfers to know or control what is being written about them.

“People can say virtually anything and it’s there in the public domain,” said a spokes-woman for Tiger Two, which helps high-profile and celebrity clients control their presence on the net, charging £2,000-£5,000 a month for its services.

Recent victims of online embarrassment have included two of Britain’s top junior tennis players. Last September, David Rice, ranked as the country’s second-best junior male player, and Naomi Broady, the national under18 champion, were suspended by the Lawn Tennis Association because of photos of them drinking and partying on the social networking site Bebo.

Will Critchlow, a director at Distilled, said of his service: “It’s not about hiding it. It’s about getting the other side of the story across.

“We are not in any way interested in helping someone cover up something illegal. We research all our clients thoroughly.”

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