Legitimate SEO tactic or slimy trick?

[Shift4SMS]

My company has a competitor that every few months publishes a blog posting "Ways people find us" and then they list what they call "interesting keywords and phrases people used to find them." I'm assuming they are going through their web server logs to pull these keywords and phrases, but who knows? What this appears to be doing is bumping up their search scores for terms that already worked to find their site (assuming they pulled the list from their logs). This part sounds appealing to me but, many of these terms include competitor names which now allows them to ride on the coattails of their competitors.

To me, I don't have an issue with a vendor using a competitors name in legitimate content on their site but I question whether or not reposting search keywords and phrases is "legitimate content." Like the title asks, is this is a legitimate SEO tactic or a slimy trick?

[emils]

This part sounds appealing to me but, many of these terms include competitor names which now allows them to ride on the coattails of their competitors.

Question is, why would you want to go this way with your own website? This is keyword stuffing and keyword spam. And I do not see it as a legitimate business practice if it includes your competitor's brands as well.

Yeh I suppose I could gain a lot of targeted visitors, for example, by adding my competitor brands to adwords and serving my ads on top of searches for their brand names... But I DON'T. Because it's unfair and you can likely get sued, also if everyone does that, where would all this go?

There is only one thing to "gain" - additional visitors (not buyers) - but they will land on a nasty page that no one would like. Myself I go away from such a page. I don't think Google will also like that page. Perhaps it will show up in some searches but I don't think it will perform well at all.

If you're looking at gaining additional traffic through search engines, with decent conversions and also to rank high on a bunch of keywords, research your best keywords and phrases, set up a blog on your website, write original articles related to your business, and add your desired phrases to such original documents ( search the forum for 'long tail' techniques ). You can spend a few dollars on such work to hire someone to do it if you don't have the time, but it will pay on the long run.

Just if someone is doing a different kind of spam and seems to get away with it, it doesn't mean it's good for you.

[Shift4SMS]

Thank you emils. What seemed appealing was a search engine bump on terms that people already used to find my site, like "payment card gateway." I do feel this is a slimy tactic but I wanted feedback from others -- are tactics like this the norm (albeit slimy)?

As for the competitor reference, personally, I rarely if ever include competitor names or anything competitor specific within my website content except in white papers that I write where I want to be vendor neutral. I guess I'm old school in believing that you should not mention competitors in site content or ads because it just gives them exposure on my dime.

[morestar]

I would do it. I'd write copy in the same way hoping for the same results that I'm sure the competitor is getting. The competitor isn't only getting traffic as visitors and not buyers and you're missing a little facet of SEO and internet marketing - the landing page:

The landing page
If visitors to his page see the content, which in this case is 'slightly' useless to the visitor because they are probably searching for a product or service the style of the page then land on could still turn the visitor into a conversion - easily.

Also, that page probably adds power, zoom, freshness, keywords, substantiation of those keywords, to his site's overall profile and the page IS relevant but probably not going to show up in the search results for many/any searches - all depending on how much link-power he has given to the page. Have they?

Will you show us the URL?

Now I'm not saying this particular competitor has an amazing landing page, but my point is, if you do what he/she's doing, do it right, with a decent landing page, you can easily convert that person.

It's a free world, we can write whatever we want on our websites - there's nothing slimy here in my opinion - and I say go for it, do what he/she's doing.

[DonOmite]

Look at this from a different perspective. What are you doing on the internet? Trying to make money or live by some vague moral code that nobody else is? What they are doing is legitimate business tactics on the net or off. Did you ever notice things like McDonald's making commercials that referred to themself as "Micky Dees"? They didn't come up with that, they got it from what the consumers were actually calling them. So if people are finding your site by search terms you didn't think of, then go for them. Things like those "keyword clouds" are basically doing the same thing.

[a53mp]

It's smart. A lot of sites do this, especially forum and community content based sites. Slimy? Maybe.. Legitimate? Probably.. the way they stuff the keywords is relevant.. so they may benefit off of it. It's an interesting approach at least. Will it do them a lot of good in the long? I'm guessing probably not, but who knows.

Just think of it this way.. if they are your competitor and they are doing just as good or better than you, they are probably doing something right. Doesn't mean you should copy what they do, but you need to do something better, more innovative, and something that will get people to your site instead of theirs.

[mgandy]

As far as the blog post goes keyword stuffing is frowned upon and makes for bad content. However, from an SEO standpoint it doesn't have that much value if all the links are coming from the same blog. It might help with getting new content or web pages indexed faster but overall has little weight. All the links are coming from the same ip address therefore the links are devalued.

I hope this helps,

Mike

[texxs]

sure that's legitimate. It's just not very effective. They could be writing persuasive content that turns visitors into customers, instead they are writing this drivel. Consider yourself lucky.

[morestar]

As far as the blog post goes keyword stuffing is frowned upon and makes for bad content. However, from an SEO standpoint it doesn't have that much value if all the links are coming from the same blog. It might help with getting new content or web pages indexed faster but overall has little weight. All the links are coming from the same ip address therefore the links are devalued.

This really isn't true at all to be honest with you, or not at all from my perspective.

Here's my recent scenario: I found a competitor had managed to create a new keyword set related to our niche through television ads. I realized that their constant mentioning of that keyword-set could (coulds always matter) compel internet users to search for that same keyword set when looking for our services.

So, I paid a visit to one of my blogs that I use for such things and starting writing articles after article about the keyword-set, funnelled much of the links to one main page that linked to a special page setup on my main site dedicated to that new key-phrase and viola, as it stands (let me check) its' #2 for that keyword out of 65,000,000 pages.

All the links came from this one blog only - possibly a few cross-posted places but that's it.

Why did this work with all the links from one blog? Quality Content...The King!

[DonOmite]

Way back when MJ and I were taking SEO classes (bet you don't remember we were classmates) one of the lessons was "look at what your competitors are doing right and emulate (not copy) it". There were some dirty tricks too like resubmitting sites that you thought were ranked too high. But submissions don't seem to be happening nowdays with the age of the spider. But looking at the top 10 sites and seeing things like their keyword density, number of words etc etc was a very legitimate method of getting top spots.