You’d be surprised what you can learn from spammers

At first glance, you might not think there’s anything to be learned from online pill spammers, other than a poetic mastery of the English language that produces jewels like “Order now and let your carnal life turn into the bright fest of pleasure!”

But there is one reason to pay attention to pill spammers, at least in the SEO space – they do rank for some of the most competitive terms on the Net, where millions of dollars are at stake.  And in the confusing world of SEO, filled with misinformation and verbose, self-proclaimed experts of questionable expertise, wouldn’t it be nice to know what you’re hearing actually works?

Don’t try this at home

I am not advocating anyone copy spammer tactics, nor am I suggesting doing anything against Google’s rules.  What I am advocating is understanding how spammers are able to manipulate Google, because doing so reveals a lot about how Google works, and therefore informs your understanding of SEO.  Once you’ve got that understanding, you can use it an ethical manner.

Spammers are surprisingly effective at exploiting Google

Pill spammers know how to play Google like a violin.  Type queries into Google like “buy Viagra” or “buy Tramadol” and you might be surprised whom you’ll find there.   After all, these are high-value keywords that millions of people search for, so Google must’ve found a way to keep these results free of spam, right?  Err, not really…. Here is a screenshot of Google’s “buy Tramadol” results below.  Notice anything fishy about it?

Why is TechNet selling Tramadol? Or how about the Ellis Island Foundation? Or Mayville State University? They’re not.  These websites have either been hacked or allow users to create profiles, which spammers misuse to sell pills.

Parasite hosting in a nutshell

The spamming technique you see above is called “parasite hosting,” and it works by exploiting Google’s bias in favor of trusted domains.

One of the ways Google tries to keep spammy sites out of its index is to decide which domains it can trust.  After it decides that a domain is trusted, it grants it a sort of a halo effect, where anything published on the domain gets a boost in the rankings (see Wikipedia’s ubiquitous high rankings for everything under the sun as a prime example). Parasite hosting uses Google’s own anti-spam defense mechanism against it by placing spam on trusted domains.

How spammers use parasite hosting

SEO spammers find established, trusted websites they can hack into, and then once they gain access to the websites, they host  sales pages on on them (often without the owner knowing).  Alternatively, the spammer can avoid hacking into websites by registering profiles on trusted forums or social networking sites, and then misusing them as sales pages.  The end result is the same – the spammer uses a trusted website to host his sales page because he knows that Google will rank his page much more easily than if he used his own website.

Add links, stir, let marinate and enjoy

After the spammer uses someone else’s website to host his Tramadol sales page, that’s not enough to rank highly in Google for competitive keywords.  Although Google grants trusted sites a halo effect, the halo effect is not so strong that page ranks highly on its own.  Rather, the spammer needs to build inlinks to the parasite page, with the anchor text “buy Tramadol.” When you combine links with a trusted page, Google tends to rank the page highly.

So at this point the spammer uses automated tools to spam/hack websites and insert anchor text optimized links to his parasite hosted page.  This can be done in several ways, two of which are using automated forum/blog spam software or hacking into websites and inserting links (Avvoblog, unfortunately, has had to deal with this a few times as well).

Lessons you can apply

Okay, so now you’ve learned the sleazy tactics of spammers, but what does this have to do with legal marketing online? Well, if it wasn’t already clear before, the magic formula in Google is…

Trusted domain + anchor text optimized links = high rankings

Spammers have proven the formula works to an embarrassing degree for Google, and although they’ve exploited it using unethical and illegal means, you can ethically use it to your advantage as well.  All too often, lawyers leave out one of the two essential ingredients and then wonder why they’re not doing well in Google.

Lesson 1: Make Google trust you

If you have a website that’s competing for very competitive keywords, you need to build your own halo effect to succeed.  You do this by getting other trusted websites to link to you.

Can you get a link from your college? Your law school? Are you a member of any reputable associations that can link to you? Do you sponsor any charities that could link to you?  Will the media link to you?  If you start thinking this way, you can find opportunities to build links from trusted websites.  Building trust is a difficult and slow process, but one that is becoming increasingly important to Google.  In fact, the CEO of Google recently alluded to further reliance on brands (which can be read as domain trust) to weed out spam.

Lesson 2: Use trust to gauge what’s realistic in SEO and act accordingly

If your website isn’t trusted by Google, you’re probably not going to rank highly for “mesothelioma lawyer” any time soon.  And if you don’t have the requisite time or inclination to build a trust-halo effect on your own website, then it may be smarter to get yourself on a website that’s already trusted.  Spammers do this through hacking, but you don’t have to.  Get yourself a profile on Avvo, Linkedin, Justia, etc.  Google already views these domains as trusted, so your efforts may be better spent promoting your profile on these websites rather than starting from scratch with your own.

Lesson 3: Use trust in reputation management

Let’s say there’s a web page out there that says something unflattering about you.  The only way you’re going to make it “go away” is by bumping it down in the search results.  Again, this is an opportunity to use trusted domains to your advantage.  Create profiles on as many trusted domains as possible, link to them, and watch them bump off the unflattering web page.   By cultivating a presence on multiple trusted websites early on, you can even create a defense around your name that will be hard to break down.

Lesson 4:  SEO friendly is not enough — you need links

Nothing you can do on your website alone will be sufficient to rank for highly competitive terms.   Links are what really give a webpage the PageRank it needs to rank highly, and your domain’s trust determines how many links you’ll need.   Spammers know this and so they get thousands of links even after securing a trusted webpage.  Lawyers often forget this and think their web page for “DUI lawyer” will rank just because it’s there and it’s “SEO friendly.”  It won’t.  Just because Google can find and crawl your website easily doesn’t mean it’s putting it on the first page.

Follow the formula

At the end of the day, parasite hosting is just a clever, albiet often illegal, way of exploiting Google’s reliance on trust and links.  Make trust and links your goal, pursue them ethically, and you too can rank highly (minus the sleaze).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 3:55 pm by Nick and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.