What can you do to defend yourself and your company against egregious cases of merit-less Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest defamation? (mislabeling you/your company a scam)

What if all the normal reputation management strategies (blogging, articles, videos, social networking, etc.) are futile?

Are there any credible reputation management firms that could uncover whether a malicious competitor might be BlackHat-manipulating fabricated "searches" to influence Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest?

Note: During the time period immediately preceding this, the AdWords KW suggestion tool saw an inexplicable spike in searches for our company founder and main product name during the past few months. (no new campaigns, nothing viral, nothing that could possibly explain a 3-4x increase in these 2 incredibly-niched long-tail searches)

One more key thing: NOTHING in the SERPS would even remotely suggest that our founder or company name has even minor reputation management problems. (Google and Yahoo! both say Suggest gathers from "popular" searches. But can searches really be popular if nothing in the SERPs backs up the "popular" assertion?!?)

Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you

Google seems to have a few more problems - they rank Rippoff Reports that defame people as well... the problem is they go for varying suggestions... maybe provide more diversed page names with the initial terms covered with others

Thanks for your reply. I really appreciate your input. However I'm not exactly clear on what you mean by the last part of your response. If you could be so kind to clarify or provide an example of this, I'd be very grateful:

"maybe provide more diversed page names with the initial terms covered with others"

Also, do you know of any credible reputation management firms that have expertise in addressing Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest issues?

That part is really going to have to be to load them with other alternatives that push it lower... they see the page views of content... especially if the site comes up in general search and gets hits