"Garfunkel's success at remaking Kraus' Google image so quickly with such little effort supports my original view that the alleged problem is de minimis."

This seems disingenuous, given that Garfunkel called upon a major news website to provide that "link love" to Kraus. Since Google pays attention to the quality of the websites doing the linking, that presumably made a big difference . Assuming that Garfunkel and Slate.com aren't going to do that for every person who needs to change their Google search results, it's hardly evidence that the problem is easily fixed for everyone.

bagelwoman-- you are correct that this wasn't trivial (after all, no one else thought to do this), and I sympathize with you that this is a problem for more people.

If you read my account of how I did this (which Shafer linked to as an addendum to the original piece, and in this piece as well), it explains which sites linked to Kraus and what their PageRanks were. In fact, Slate was not part of the equation-- the original piece did not link directly to Kraus.