Predatory SEO Techniques

It should be intuitively obvious by now that the shrinking global economy has led many companies to reduce expenses, including cut-backs in advertising. The reduced advertising budgets have weakened competition and as a result many auction-based advertising systems have seen drops in the base prices for click-throughs on a large number of keywords.

The drop in base pricing means that Web publishers who carry ads are seeing a decline in eCPM, even if they manage to build more traffic to their sites. Around the beginning of December I noticed several Web marketing forums where people were complaining about decreases in revenue from Google AdSense and similar programs. I believe the process may have accelerated in January.

The reduction of advertising revenues suggests that many advertising-supported Web services may be forced to cut back on expenses or go out of business. Once the cycle begins it is hard to stop until you hit rock bottom. When we went through this process in the 2000-2001 Dot-Com Meltdown, a lot of “major” Web sites vanished quickly.

But people who depend on search engine optimization to enhance the traffic to their sites have learned a few lessons since 2001. Those lessons have given rise to a class of search optimization practices that I consider to be predatory (not necessarily in a fraudulent way, but rather as an extreme form of aggressive marketing).

Predatory SEO Technique 1: Domaining
For example, there is now a robust domaining industry, where speculators buy expired domains and put advertising on them in the hope of capitalizing on residual traffic and old links pointing to dead content.

Some domainers have earned millions of dollars over the years through this process, sparking an upsurge in wannabe latecomers who really lack the resources to compete at that level. Then again, whenever there is a gold rush there are merchants who sell picks, pans, and shovels to the miners. You can buy or license software to launch your domaining empire almost instantaneously. All you need is to scarf up some good domains — but good luck getting in ahead of the queue.

Predatory SEO Technique 2: Repurposing Domains
Some people acquire the Web assets of a failed company and repurpose those Web sites. Because Google has suggested it will restart the so-called “Link Clock” for domains that change hands, some people now arrange buy domains without changing the registration name (they have ways of controlling the assets indirectly). This practice is aimed at retaining whatever value age and inbound linking have created despite the fact that completely new content may be positioned on the domains.

Predatory Technique 3: Sub-domain Hijacking
A recent Web spam tactic has focused on hijacking DNS tables to attach unauthorized sub-domains to established domains. So if you should see “super-porn.seo-theory.com” please drop us a line, as we have no intention of going into the porn industry or of creating such a sub-domain. The fact that you don’t have to host a sub-domain on the same server as the primary domain means someone could be piggy-backing on your good name right now and you won’t know it — unless you stumble across the sub-domain in a site search or something (use queries like “site:example.com” rather than “site:www.example.com” to see which sub-domains appear for your site).

Predatory SEO Technique 4: Ranking By Default
Some people will position a Ringer site in the search results beneath an established brand site that you suspect is having financial difficulty. Suppose I operate “michaels-great-shoes-store-online.com” and I rank first for “Michael’s great shoes store”. Your keyword research determines I have built a loyal search audience that searches for me about 1,000 times per month.

But you’ve also heard I’m going out of business. So you grab a domain name like “some-really-great-shoes-stores-online.info” and you start writing copy about online shoe stores, including Michael’s Great Shoes Store. With the right on-page copy and maybe a few links you get the number 2 listing for my keyword. Since people find my site first you don’t see that much traffic.

But then I go out of business and my site vanishes. Your site is waiting right there, with contextual ads in place, and it fills the vacuum. That residual traffic might last for days, weeks, months, or even years.

Predatory SEO Technique 5: Affiliate Warfare
Retailers who are struggling to build their market shares sometimes turn to aggressive affiliate marketing. Since the retailers cannot build their traffic quickly enough to bring in sufficient revenue they hope they can recruit good affiliate sites to help them. One rule for success is to divorce your brand from the keywords that the affiliates seek to monetize. Many a time I’ve seen retailers complain about their affiliates outranking their own sites for the company brand.

Although you and your affiliates have to respect your competitors’ trademarks and copyrights, pretty much anything else is fair game. That includes sending your message to your competitors’ customers through similar channels, similar advertising, and similar promotions. Offering favorable comparisons that consistently show your products and services as better is acceptable as long as you don’t mislead consumers. Emphasize your strengths and your competitors’ weaknesses without confusing the consumer.

Over the past few weeks I have actually seen faux testimonials on blogs for a revenue source that make it clear someone has incentivized endorsement blogging. I don’t think the blogs are violating any FTC rules because they disclose their relationship to the service. On the other hand, the cookie-cutter faux testimonial copy is an obvious clue to the manipulation occurring in the blogosphere. The guy behind this initiative has a leg up on his competitors, who didn’t think about this idea first.

Predatory SEO Technique 6: Claim Jumping

If you have built a large, robust Web site then you undoubtedly track many keywords. Even if you’re using a spreadsheet and software to manage your rankings you may not notice very quickly when someone starts to systematically nudge your site out of secondary keywords. These are the keywords that produce reasonable amounts of low traffic. You considered them worth optimizing for but not worth agonizing over.

Someone else may be able to double or triple their traffic just by bumping you out of the search results for a few secondary expressions. The point of claim jumping is not to knock a competitor out of business, but rather to take a small segment of his query space away from him. Some claim jumpers have preyed upon multiple competitors this way and built up large traffic sites. After all, once people start visiting a site, if they like it they’ll link to it, recommend it, and talk about it.

Claim jumping is not as hard as it might seem. You can claim jump against large companies more easily than against small operators. The large companies don’t typically watch any one segment of keywords very closely. The small operators are hoarding their rankings like miserly old prospectors who have become obsessed with their collections of gold nuggets.

Claim jumping is easiest when you prey on sites that have become careless and overconfident, that have grown into multiple query spaces, and when you can line up the assets to encroach upon their queries without drawing too much attention.

Conclusion

There are certainly other predatory SEO techniques. The techniques I outlined above are most appropriate in so-called “carrion” and “wounded animal” situations, where you circle the carcass and feed off its remnants or where you bring in a pack of hunters to run a competitor into the ground.

As the recession takes its toll on the business community, more people will turn to predatory SEO techniques in order to build their market share and boost their revenues. They may not succeed, as using these techniques does not guarantee either success or survival. But the herds are going to be thinned out by deprivation over the next year. Don’t surprised if you see a few predators closing in to speed the process along.