The bald SEO agent strikes again!

Do a search for your name in Google. What comes up? I’m a lucky duck and I only share my name with a Tasmanian “writer” and a London Assembly Member, neither of whom have much Google juice. Matthew Creamer, on the other had, had a problem. He shared his name with a bunch of people who were not Ad Age editors and they definitely got more juice than him.

He turned to SEO to help him, creating his own blog and a bunch of Facebook and MySpace accounts.

Reprise created for me no fewer than 13 social-media accounts that would link to each other and, where possible, be loaded with keywords including my name and words like “advertising” and “Ad Age” that would turn them up high in relevant searches. The overall effect, ideally, would be a web of content that would push to the top of my search rankings — and, in the process, drive traffic to my stories on Ad Age, all the while pushing the impostors out. The hub for my brand would be MattCreamer.com, a brand-new blog that hosts links to my work for Ad Age as well as posts about news in the marketing and media world.

To make a long story short, he hired a SEO firm to put his name at the top of the Creamer list. Thank God his name wasn’t Dirk Diggler.

Optimize Me: A Reporter’s Journey into the World of SEO and SEM [ADAge]