This was an interesting business tactic I saw the other day where there was a person who had a fairly bad history business wise as he seemed to have duped a lot of people. As result word got around in real life his reputation of course pretty much died. Even when you searched online it would generate some negative articles. That’s where it got interesting.
Apparently he hired a company of sorts to try and change this perception of him based solely on trying to flood the first page search engine results with positive articles about himself. So the company basically generated a ton of social media and made up pages to hopefully dominate the first page. As it turned out when people searched his name now a ton of these pages actually did appear at the top. This apparently did influence people to see him in a different light.
Kind of a sneaky modern day way of putting a person or a business in a different light huh? I do wonder how true this is from a psychologic pointy of view where as long as the first page results are say all positive whether or not the other pages of negative results are less valued by people. It would show why people would want to manipulate results in these ways.
I know for myself I would usually just base it more on how reliable I feel the source is. But I can imagine for the majority it’s like walking in a supermarket aisle where the design and wording of a box is so important as that is your first impression. No need to wonder why people spend big dollars on these kinds of things.