To the right is a short video by Matt Cutts a former senior engineer at Google - he discusses basic search engine and how Google performs searches.
So, what does that mean to Reputation Management? When someone googles your name or your company, the results are displayed with ads at the top and bottom of the list with organic results in the middle.

If you have been maligned on the web and those pages show in those first three pages you have a problem. One of the best ways to defeat this is to have one or more pages that rank above the sites/pages that provide bad or harmful information.
Reputation Protection Attorneys have programs to build multiple websites that will rank high in a search and "push down" offending sites.