Web of Words
the world wide web, a web of words

Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring the online reputation of an entity, be it a person, a company, a government or something else and putting actions in place if or when something negative about this entity surfaces.

Let’s say Acme Corporation has a product called Foobarbaz and reports surface online that this product just plain sucks. Of course Acme Corporation is afraid that if their sales will suffer so they go to an online reputation management company (often a SEO company specializing in online reputation management) and they will try to deal with it. They may try to manipulate the SERPS so that bad reviews of that product are not visible when you search for that product or discredit the user in question so that other people who read the review will not believe him/her.

Link laundering is a technique used in Search Engine Optimization where you build a lot of spammy websites that are getting a lot of links from bad neighborhoods and which might get your sites penalized or deindexed completely. So these spammy sites take the risk and link out to other websites that you own which in turn link to the site that you want to rank.