Has anyone ever created a negative Website or written an unflattering post about you or your company? Those flaming Websites and blog posts can be damaging and have long-lasting effects. Is there anything you can do about it?

Well, a new industry has popped up called Reputation Management with the promise of burying those negative pages and replacing them with positive pages.

This week’s BusinessWeek magazine has an article about the practice. Here’s how it works. After tracking negative pages, the reputation management company will promote pages with positive data and then do search engine optimization. The result? The positive pages rise in rank and the negative pages are pushed off the first page of search results – the ultimate goal. And some reputation management companies hire bloggers to blog about their clients, which creates more positive pages.

It seems there are ways to remove negative comments lurking in cyberspace, but what caused people to make negative comments in the first place? If they’re disgruntled customers, it may be time to face your critics head-on and win their trust back.