Mar
03
2008
| Siteground.com and Their Search Results Domination |
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| Monday, 03 March 2008 | |
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A few people have asked for examples of those techniques and I found a great one today. Siteground is a hosting company that targets the Open Source niche. They offer middle-of-the-road prices and like many other companies they manage servers at the ThePlanet.com. They do offer fast answers to support tickets, but generally they offer the same product as many other companies. So, how do they fill the search engine results with their company and drive more customers than their rivals?
Siteground's Hosting "Review" SitesOne of their main strategies is to build a large number of extra sites that appear to be a neutral hosting review site, but are in fact simply lead generators:
How You Can Tell They Belong to Siteground?
Applying This Tactic To Your Industry
I'm sure you can think of ways to apply this to your niche. If you don't have a product that is easily distinguishable from your rivals, your online marketing will make all the difference. None of these sites are more than a few pages deep, but with a keyword-rich domain name, interlinking and some basic on-site optimization, you may be able to drive thousands of extra visitors each month.
Comments (14)
  written by Steve Burge, March 03, 2008
Hi Ed
You're right - theres quite a bit more to right about how dominant these guys are. They really do have some smart SEM talent in the company.  written by Anne Hennegar, March 04, 2008
Did you happen to notice how many domains they owned? According to domaintools.com it's north of 1900.
written by Steve Burge, March 04, 2008
Hi Anne
Well spotted - these guys have a good operation going. They build many sites but lots of them such as Best-Joomla-Templates.com and Mambo-Templates.com simply point to inside pages on the main Siteground site. Its a nice SEO tactic too. I picked up SteveBurge.com a while ago, pointed it to Alledia.com, and almost immediatelys rose from #15 to #1 for "Steve Burge". written by Cory Webb, March 05, 2008
I'm not a big fan of the "Hosting Review" sites tactic. Sure, it gets results, but it just seems a little too unethical to me. It makes me not want to use their services because it causes me to trust them less.
written by Mark Simpson, March 05, 2008
It's despicable IMO. Thanks for highlighting this Steve.. I'll never use or recommend Siteground again. Grabbing additional domains and building "feeder" websites is a great way to grab extra traffic and sales, but cooking up reviews.. that's just pathetic.
Sorry to be negative here Steve. written by Steve Burge, March 05, 2008
Hi Cory and Mark
Very interesting points. I was undecided as to whether to address the morality of this in the post. In the end I decided to let readers draw their own conclusion. Overall, I do believe that creating fake reviews and not declaring the sites' biases are unethical, although fairly standard tactic in a cutthroat industry. written by Cory Webb, March 05, 2008
I understand that it's a standard tactic, but I would rather lose business than stoop to something so unethical. Ultimately, if you run a good business and prove yourself to be trustworthy, that will keep customers coming back. Shady, unethical tactics only who their true colors and turn people off.
written by Steve Burge, March 05, 2008
Hi Cory
I agree with you - there are several rival companies that don't use these tactics, don't run aggressive affiliate programs and build through word-of-mouth. Interestingly, take a look at this screenshot I took earlier. Siteground are using Google Adwords to advertise multiple sites so they absolutely dominate the results for "joomla hosting"   written by Makaleler, March 06, 2008
I personally think that this is an ethic way to do. It's a convince for the web developers like us
 regards trichnosis written by Daniel Chapman, March 06, 2008
The problem I think is that unethical just works too well. I highly doubt the guys at SG woke up one morning and said "ok team let's find the most unethical way to boost our search rankings and do it!"
They just went looking for the most effective. Which this is. It just happens to be really, really dirty at the same time. It more shows a fundamental flaw in the google system which I hope gets plugged soon. They went out and sprung the big PR hits on sites selling links, so lets hope they do the same to sites making links. The sad part is that it's probably more effective than a lot of the more secret black hat tricks like hidden links, keywords hidden under images etc. and it seems to be more than legal to do it. I think I will go and start setting up my own Extension club ranking sites.  Perhaps not...  written by Good Web Practices, March 06, 2008
Great article and Steve that last image you posted yesterday just shows how successful it is.
I agree with the others that this is not really an ethical route to go down. I actually remember that a while back when I was looking into Joomla hosting I kept running into those review websites and they literally never helped! If one of their competitors really cared about this, I think they could always report SiteGrounds actions to Google. At the end of the day I don't honestly think that from a users point of vide Google is producing good search results for "Joomla Hosting". written by Unbiased hosting reviews, March 10, 2008
Why do you think other web hosting review sites offer unbiased reviews about hosting providers? Most host directories earn affiliate commissions from the "well-known" players in the industry. Do you think they are interested in publishing negative reviews about the hosts, who earn them cash? I think only hosts who pay low commission rates get negative reviews.
written by Steve Burge, March 10, 2008
Very true indeed - I think the solution is to avoid sites that rely on affiliate links and look for information via word-of-mouth and from forums like http://www.webhostingtalk.com.
Not knocking affiliate sites - its a valid business model - but people its best not to put much weight on their recommendations. Write comment
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Last year I wrote a couple of posts about how important it was to 
Great article. I only noticed the other day the dominance these guys have for joomla keywords. Thanks for sharing how these guys are pulling it off.