Siteground.com and Search Results Domination

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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.

Comments

#1 Ed Bloom 2008-03-03 16:45

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.

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#2 Steve Burge 2008-03-03 19:21

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.

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#3 Anne Hennegar 2008-03-04 00:26

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

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#4 Steve Burge 2008-03-04 08:27

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".

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#5 Cory Webb 2008-03-05 01:49

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.

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#6 Mark Simpson 2008-03-05 04:49

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.

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#7 Steve Burge 2008-03-05 09:32

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.

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#8 Cory Webb 2008-03-05 10:51

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.

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#9 Steve Burge 2008-03-05 10:59

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"

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