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Home / SEO / Siteground.com and Search Results Domination

Mar

2008

Siteground.com and Search Results Domination

Written by Steve Burge

Siteground Last year I wrote a couple of posts about how important it was to fill the search engine rankings with positive mentions of your company. Its one of the cornerstones of online reputation management and can help to filter out bad news about your company.

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" Sites

One 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:

Drupalhosting.net (#1 on Google for "Drupal Hosting")
Mambo-hosting-directory.com
Oscommerce-hosting-directory.com (#5 on Google for "OSCommerce Hosting")
Forum-hosting-directory.com (#8 on Google for "Forum Hosting")
Blog-hosting-directory.com
Wikihosting.net

How You Can Tell They Belong to Siteground?

Siteground are the (*cough*) best-reviewed host on each site.
There aren't any live links to any other host.
They chose small, no-name hosts to list alongside their own ads. No big brand names to catch the visitors eye.
All the sites are on the main Sitegrounds servers: NS1.CLEV1.NET and NS2.CLEV1.NET
Each site is linked to all the others via the footer.
They used the same designer who does the Joomla templates distributed on Siteground.com.

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Your Comments (20)

Ed Bloom

March 03, 2008

Hey there,

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.

Steve Burge

March 04, 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.

Anne Hennegar

March 04, 2008

Did you happen to notice how many domains they owned? According to domaintools.com it's north of 1900.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, Siteground are using Google Adwords to advertise multiple sites so they absolutely dominate the results for "joomla hosting"

Ulas ALKAN

March 06, 2008

I personally think that this is an ethic way to do. It's a convince for the web developers like us smilies/angry.gif

regards
trichnosis

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. smilies/cheesy.gif

Perhaps not...

David Towers

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".

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.

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.

Ryan Best

May 25, 2008

not to put much weight on their recommendations

I agree that is the decision of the Google users to find fake testimonials and or recommendations etc. Who wants a company who talks great about themselves cloaked as someone else? What I do not agree with is finding fault with stock piling industry domains that are rich in keywords and using them. I have north of 600 domains in my industry older than 5 years and I want to use them. No competitor was smart enough to buy them. If Google decides to not rank me well because I choose to use the keyword domain and not a sub-domain or keyword after the root that stinks. I frankly can?t see the difference?. I think using a domain if you have is better anyway more pure if you will.? My main site should be able to look like all my other ?less important? sites and even link to my main one to keep customers from becoming confused. I am not duplicating any content, but using the domains I have access to for the keywords in them. As long as we are not manipulating what?s the problem? This to me for those who have the real estate in domains is better than just creative URL structure. I hope Google always rewards a good URL! http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the...-all-ships I hope Rand could help find a way to be best practices the use of multiple domains and I will keep sacrificing my Ho-Hos budget.

John Rodney

August 10, 2008

I totally agree with the author. There are so many negative comments and reviews about siteground and how badly they suck on the Internet, but they do an amazing job of hiding how terrible they are by creating all these bogus review sites. I have tried to post negative comments on these sites, but the comments either are never posted, or the sites do not even accept comments.

John Rodney

August 10, 2008

I totally agree with the author. There is no way to post anything negative on any of these negative siteground sites. I actually started my own and purchased google ad words to start to combat them...

Andrew

August 29, 2008

Wow. I just read about this on the Drupal site. Well done for spotting it.

Andrew

Drupal Hosting

September 01, 2008

ranned a lot into these sites but didn't had a clue they were from siteground. Didn't notice

deadlydave

January 04, 2010

Sorry to digress back to a recent post... but does owning a particular domain name and pointing it to your domain actually increase the SEO for that keyword?