Today I share something that most SEO experts won’t discuss with you and that’s called reverse SEO. It’s a practice that takes place among your competition and people who have a webpage or website that they don’t want people to see. Reverse SEO is something that a competitor would try to do to your website. I did a quick Google search and it’s interesting because the results don’t discuss this. They talk about it in terms of reputation management, which I’ll get into a little bit tomorrow and technically you can use it for that purpose, but I think there’s a a different name for that in my experience. However, reverse SEO is something that you use to suppress a page and it’s something that you would want to do if you want to rank ahead of your competition.
It’s not ethical in my opinion, because you shouldn’t be interfering with other people’s businesses. I think that you can outperform them with your product. You can have better customer service and better reviews and you can win the ranking game with Google through above-board tactics.
One of my past experiences was when I received thousands of visitors a month from Russia, Germany and from China. That was a campaign that was being waged against me by one of my competitors. It kept my website from ranking at the top of Google until I figured out how to block the traffic and disavow the links that they were connecting to my site.
There is however a legitimate purpose if you have content that you don’t want to be on Google, you may want to protect the content.
For example, let’s say that you have a website that you’re driving advertising traffic to, to make sales and you don’t want your competition to know that you have this sales page out there on the internet. You could block Google from that site and keep that website from ranking in the search engine so that nobody knows about it except for the ad traffic that you’re sending.
Think about that for a second.
If you’ve got a great campaign that’s generating a lot of money for you, you don’t really want the competition to be able to see it and copy it, right?
So it would make sense to have your public facing website, which is ranking in Google, but then you have a special dedicated site for sales. It’s something that you would want keep people from seeing randomly in Google searches. You wouldn’t want that to be indexed and crawled by Google.
You wouldn’t want it to be showing up at the top of the search pages if that’s where you’re sending all the traffic. Because, remember, a lot of businesses actually duplicate instead of innovate. Heck, maybe that’s what you’ve done and want to hide it from your competition.
You want to control what everyone sees so that each person who comes in contact with your brand gets the message you’ve personally developed for them.
You can do that simply through the robots.txt file, and there’s even the checkbox inside WordPress to keep Google from crawling your site.
Ironically, that checkbox is also something you should be looking for. If you’ve outsourced your web design to somebody in India, for example, they’ll often leave that box checked when they deliver the website, which means that Google will never crawl it, and then they’re going to come back to you later and try to sell you SEO services.
When you pay them, all they do is uncheck the box. Just a little thing that we’ve observed over the years…