A general solution for this kind of problem: get other content above them in Google. This is not hard; mugshot pages and the like have very little PageRank mojo. The only reason they're at the top of the results is that there's nothing else with your name to compete.
All you have to do is make a few interesting things (blog posts, github, etc.) with your name on them and post them to sites like reddit, and they'll easily beat any data-combing reputation smear site.
>According to the article that isn't true, mugshot sites have high Google scores because people tend to linger on them.
I can only speculate about causes, but I also have someone in another state with my name (even a matching middle initial) on mugshot sites, and the tiniest other references to me (my wedding registry for example) knocked it off the top Google results page immediately.
As for 99.9% of people not having a GitHub account: so what? I was giving a suggestion relevant to a typical HN user, not advice for the general population. The general advice is to do things like that. The point is that if a wedding registry on theknot.com (Hell, I'm not even sure I made that wedding registry; it might have been auto-gen'd from our Amazon registry) can outsell the undesirable sites on Google, you can easily make ten results happen that knock it off.
GitHub just happens to be an exceptionally good one for an HNer, since it's the kind of thing that an employer is likely to actually want to see.
Most people do have know enough to make sure they have accounts in their name on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogspot, Pinterest etc. which tend to rank very well in name searches.
This hasn't worked for me. My linkedin and Facebook accounts showed up above the mugshot but everything else was below it. My fairly active github profile, personal site, and twitter profile for example were all lower ranked than the mugshot site.
All you have to do is make a few interesting things (blog posts, github, etc.) with your name on them and post them to sites like reddit, and they'll easily beat any data-combing reputation smear site.