• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, June 29, 2015

We’re well over a decade into the social media age now, and that means that a lot of people have had a lot of opportunities to put very ill-advised things online, learning only too late the tragic lesson that stuff lives forever on the Internets. “Ah, how terrible is wisdom when it profiteth not the wise!”

But that rad pic of you doing the combined keg stand and gravity bong doesn’t have to scupper your job prospects forever. While you can’t actually eliminate every piece of incriminating content, you can make it less likely that people will actually find it, and increase the chances they will come across more flattering information, with new tools from Social Life Management.

The company has unveiled a set of online reputation management capabilities for individuals as well as organizations, including search engine optimization, public relations, and legal tools, according to VentureBeat, which first reported the news. Social Life Management (http://www.sociallifemanagement.com) also created a “Social Life” score, assigning them a score from 100 to 400 somewhat like a credit score (or Klout score). The score incorporates, among other things, search visibility, keywords associated with your name (or your company’s name), and sentiment analysis.

People and companies can use Social Life Management tools to check out their online reputations and then take action, if necessary, to (let’s be honest) sweep the bad stuff under the rug, which can include everything from getting social networks to remove old, embarrassing photos, to responding to negative reviews, to removing public records. In addition to polishing your reputation, its tools can help you raise your visibility in general, for example by distinguishing yourself from other people with the same name.

The SEO component is especially interesting: Social Life Management basically pushes links to adverse content further down the search results (say, from the first page to the second page of results) by identifying keywords associated with damaging content, then creating and optimizing new links containing the same keywords.