I never Google myself. Well, I used to (a bit), but now never. Because someone has pinched my name, you see, and so looking up Rosie Millard on the internet is a bit of a grim voyage – for me.

If you tap in my name (and yes, I am aware I am now drawing attention to it), instead of finding a nice website showing examples of my work, maybe a link to my London marathon charity site, to my sole literary offering or to my agent, you will find something entirely different.

Hideously manipulated photographs, mocking text, a silly voice-over, even a nude picture of yours truly. I know: most of this stuff has appeared in the public domain before and most of it was – if not actually written by me – inspired by something written by me. I know, I know. I opened the Millard box in the first place.

I should also concede that there is quite a droll sense of humour behind this faux site.

Yet, professionally speaking, it’s not great. Anyone wanting to book me for a lecture or hire me for something on television or commission me for something serious might visit RosieMillard. com and think I’m a bit of an airhead. That I can’t add up. That my lips are weirdly puckered, that I hang out in long robes, that I carry a begging bowl or that I am a part-time nude model. This is all because an online domain pertaining to me has been bought by an online scamp who is not me.

Can I do anything about it? Actually, I can. As reported last week in this paper, the cleaning-up of online profiles – or online reputation management, as it’s known – is a growing business.

“Sometimes this happens to reasonably high-profile people because there are those out there who will buy the domain, put up a site and then snag any casual traffic associated with your name to get ad revenue,” says Michael Fertik, 29, who runs Reputation Defender in California. “And this one looks like a strong site. More than 30,000 people have already visited it, and the longer it stays up, the stronger it gets, because Google prefers legacy over immediacy. We see cases like yours all the time.”

As Fertik explains, one of the ways to combat unhelpful sites is proactively to influence the search engine that leads people to your name: “Buy another website with your name on it and promote that until it shows up as No 1. You have to start to work with other links that exist online and that will interact with each other in the right way.”

With this advice on board I visit Distilled.co.uk, a London-based company founded three years ago by Will Critchlow and Duncan Morris, which aims to help companies get to the top of search engine results. From here it was but a short leap to online reputation management.

“Managing your reputation is not about removing a negative site from Google, which is extremely difficult,” explains Critchlow, 28, “but promoting more positive sites about you so that the negative stuff is less prominent.”

Type “Kate Moss” into Google and the crucial first page, with its 10 sites, will come up squeaky-clean, full of nice promotional stuff. It’s only when you venture to page two that you arrive at the “Exclusive: Cocaine Kate” stories and all the rest.

According to Critchlow, tidying up my page one is a tough call because I have no power over the mighty Rosie Millard domain that squats at numero uno. But who has bought it? According to DNSstuff.com, a site that gives out this sort of information, it has been snapped up by a company called Red Door, which is based in Leeds. Why?

As Fertik suggested, advertising revenue is probably the motivation. The site – my site – includes links to debt management companies, which pay per online click, so clearly someone is making money off the fact that my name attracts a bit of passing trade (as it were).

Is this sort of vaguely offensive stuff illegal? “We are not lawyers, but if people are saying things that are not true you can take action,” suggests Critchlow.

“The difficulty is that sometimes the sites are not subject to British law, or they have been posted anonymously. It’s a mine-field. The biggest problem is the grey area where people stay on the right side of libel laws but say hurtful things.”

We discuss the story of a friend who has had a devastating series of abusive websites posted up against his name. Whenever you tap his name into the net, up they come, positioning him as unprofessional and immoral, which he is not.

How can he fight this? “I’d be confident we could parachute something in for him that would supersede these websites, because his domain name is still available, which is a great help,” says Critchlow.

Mine, however, is not. Yet I discover on UKreg.com (where domain names are sold) that there are other Rosie Millard sites up for grabs. “Buy them all,” says Fertik. “Buy everything with Rosie Millard on it.” He also advises me to invent, and then buy, ghastly sites such as Rosie Millard S***s, F*** Rosie Millard and the rest. Delightful.

“Yes. Get everything with those swear words in that you don’t want to say,” orders Fertik.

“You need the tools to protect yourself, and if you make yourself a target to one jerk, then that person can make your life very hard.”

Buying up offensive domain names is apparently a tried and tested technique. “I would be very surprised if the Clinton and Obama campaigns have not bought up all those sorts of names,” Fertik says, “just so they can protect themselves. We call it Google insurance: proactively establishing a web presence as insurance against possible future attacks.”

While I can’t quite focus on inventing rude domain names, I do snap up quite a few of the normal ones. The cost ranges from as little as £5.90 for two years to about £16 a year, and you can buy as many as you like. The market for domain names (essentially, a domain is anything after the http:// on a website address) is seemingly wide open. Anyone can buy as many as they want, or you can invent them yourself. Once I have purchased my fresh, gleaming Millard domains, the team at Distilled advise me on what might happen next. “You should start a blog on one of them,” Critchlow says.

He tells me the blog can be linked to giant sites bursting with online muscle such as Times Online (for my features), Amazon (for my book), Just-giving (for my charity efforts in the London marathon) and even Facebook (for my, er, social life).

The idea is that gradually the traffic going to the lovely new Rosie Millard sites will overwhelm the traffic going to the horrid old Rosie Millard site, which will be beaten down to page two, where it will wither and die from lack of interest. Plus, it might give me some professional Brownie points. “We can create a strong, positive presence for you online and generate people to talk about it online,” Critchlow says.

Distilled does this sort of thing all day long at a cost to companies and individuals of about £900 a day.

In the meantime, I’m going to nobble the people who pinched my name in the first place. Fertik could nobble them for me, but going down his online route might set me back more than £10,000. Anyway, he thinks I should go straight to a lawyer and get an ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) resolution.

“Someone has hijacked your name,” he says. “And this is a case you probably can win, in my opinion. It’s naked identity kidnapping.”

Critchlow recommends I visit an online site called Nominet. To get its dispute resolution service into gear, Nominet needs proof of two things: first, that the domain name is mine by rights (no problem there), and, second, that the current owner is operating what’s known as an abusive registration.

Easy! If Nominet rules in my favour I will get the disputed domain name under my control. This means I can have it “pointing” at any website I choose. The original, abusive website won’t necessarily disappear, but the point is, it will not come up under that domain name.

But why are people so mischievous online? Just look at the experience of 19-year-old Max Gogarty, asked by a daily broad-sheet’s website to write a blog about his travels around India and Thailand. The opprobrium and venom that flooded the site in more than 600 postings, most of them inspired by sheer envy, was such that Max’s own father, who contributes to the paper, was moved to announce the immediate termination of his son’s commission.

“It’s the stuff people might have previously ranted to their friends about in the pub,” Critchlow suggests. “One of the reasons for people being nasty is that they have no inhibitions online. They feel divorced from the impact, because they are anonymous, and yet can get some sort of micro-recognition for their comments.”

Typically for a 29-year-old in Silicon Valley, Fertik’s take on the whole online libel market is bracingly proactive: “There is a common perception that Google is the truth. That Google produces the best results. It may be the best machine invented in the 1990s but it’s still a machine. And sometimes you have to teach the machine what’s important.”

Take that, you geeks!

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