Not only that, there are a lot of these companies that scrub bad press--mostly by flushing in innocuous search data. Ironically, I can't seem to find the profile on (iirc) Justine Sacco that detailed how she used an SEO firm to try to distance her name from those news results. It's a lot of making social network profiles, filling them with personal data, and inserting fluff search results. The idea is to make someone's personal profiles more popular than outdated news results.
It's incredibly common and we wouldn't have even found out about this if it wasn't discovered in the documents.