Discredit Your Competition - Dirty Tricks You Need To Be Aware Of
Posted in Hosting, Web Master by DB
How far would you go to kill off your competition? How willing are you to cut across ethical boundaries for the sake of profit. Unfortunately many would go to any length to gain a competitive advantage. Let’s hope the following does not happen to you.
Two Companies, GoodGuy.com and BadGuy.com both offer the same service; let’s say “Hosting”, in the same town. GoodGuy.com has painstakingly employed all the right SEO tactics and as a result ranks very highly on search engines on all the right keywords. We all know hosting is one service where a good percentage of customers are organic. As a result, GoodGuy.com’s conversion rate is through the roof.
BadGuy.com fumes for a while and tries to improve his search engine rankings. Like GoodGuy.com, he uses all the right methods and means. This does have an effect to a certain extent but not enough to compete with GoodGuy.com. What BadGuy.com needs desperately is to level the playing field. Many brainstorming sessions later, a simple plan is hatched.
Several BadGuy.com employees sign up to popular forums catering to webhosting and related domain areas masquerading as GoodGuy.com’s staff. Each prominently displays “GoodGuy.com” in his/her signature. Now they start to post, innocent and legitimate requests for help.
For example
- My server crashed. Don’t know what’s wrong. Can someone help me?
- I have 500 customers on a single server. How do I migrate all of them?
- Can anyone suggest a good server management company? I need one ASAP.
- I have a very slow server, my clients are complaining of very slow performance. Can someone help me?
- I don’t have a backup. Can I still recover data from my hard drive?
Pretty soon our search engine bots come along and all these interesting and seemingly helpful discussions are indexed and slowly start appearing as part of the search results for GoodGuy.com
Consumers are a smart bunch, people these days thoroughly research a company before choosing to buy services from them and Search Engines are the tool of choice when trying to learn more about a particular company. The minute a potential customer starts to see newbie questions such as the ones listed above, doubt creeps in, what’s the point in reading or researching the company any further, hit the back button, move on to the next company on the list. End result, a lost sale for GoodGuy.com
Slowly and surely customer sign ups start to drop off for GoodGuy.com and vice versa for BadGuy.com. GoodGuy.com starts to investigate and to his horror find the above mentioned forum threads floating around. By then it’s too late, yanking the threads or complaining about them will further stir the pot and even if the posts are deleted from the forums, the search engine index is a different kettle altogether. How do I ask the search engine to only selectively de-index certain material? How do I prove to the search engines that it was an imposter that posted these seemingly innocuous but credibility damaging posts?
If BadGuy.com is smart enough, all posting done on the forums will be done using a proxy service and the chances of the trail leading back to him is next to impossible. A simple and extremely effective strategy to counter and negate your hosting competitor.
The above story is pure fiction. The point however is, with a little misplaced ethical creativity you can pretty much eliminate your competition without breaking into a sweat or legal boundaries for that matter. This narrative can be applied to any industry. With search engines driving so much traffic, managing your online identity just became very very important.
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May 20th, 2009 at 4:09 am
Pure fiction? This happened to my site.
I could see forum messages promoting a competitors site. It was blatent who they were from and no big deal.
However soon they starting getting nasty. They would discredit my site (and others) by saying “I’ve been burned before by GoodGuy. I’ll just stick with BadGuy”.
I took lots of deep breaths. I set up a page with an irrestible name on my website that no one else knew about. I send a private message containing a link to it to one of the forum messages. I watched my web logs and waited.
BadGuy couldn’t resist. They clicked it. I knew they would. People get lazy and sloppy and carried away.
I send my concerns to the forum owners along with BadGuys ip address. The forum owners deleted at least two pages worth of messages and now whenever anyone tries to mention BadGuy it gets replaces with !!!!!! (even legitimate messages).
Justice was done.