While most blog owners engage in desultory search engine cheating to boost their hits, some people are trying to defeat Google's Page Rank algorithms to obscure less than photogenic images, poor reviews and inconvenient personal histories. And it's not just individuals. Companies and other organisations are also trying to manage their image against the background of the Web.

If you own the blog or Web site, it's easy to correct these things. You just follow the advice at Google's Remove Content page. If not, you're going to have to convince the owner of the page to cease and desist. What with organisations like the Chilling Effects Clearing House coaching bloggers in resisting these things, that could prove tricky.

It isn't just Google, by the way. You've got all those other search engines, and even worse, the Way Back Machine, which lets you view snapshots of whole Web sites, year by year, whether the content has been erased or not. Unlike Google, whose cache deletes files every month or six weeks, it never deletes its cache files - although again, if you own the site, you can insert a robots.txt link.

That New York Times ">article suggests some strategies for burying unflattering details or images by way of a little Google bombing ... "create a preferred version of the facts on a home page or a blog of your own, then devise a strategy to get high-ranking Web sites to link to you".

If you're running a popular blog, you might find yourself getting lots of invitations in future from people looking for a cleansing link.