Reverse SEO? Does it mean trying to get listed lower in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)? Of course not! Reverse SEO has been interpreted in a number of different ways though.
Some say – it’s about researching your competitor’s SEO efforts – analyzing their title tags, meta description, PR, links to their domain and links to a URL found via a search query for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Does their site have quality, relevant and compelling content? Is it updated regularly? Are they using social media? In short, what separates their sites from your site? This method of SEO encompasses attempting to emulate success. I use this method daily to analyze what others are doing to rank high in the search engines.
While there is a plethora of software programs available to help analyze nearly every facet of your SEO campaign, some clearly stand out for certain metrics. SpyFu is one of the those programs. Per their website:
What Does SpyFu Do?
SpyFu exposes the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors.
Search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google: every keyword they’ve bought on AdWords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 10 years.
In the end, in order to rank higher on Google’s organic search results, you only need to outperform those sites that are currently ranking higher than your site. Wouldn’t it be great to know what they’re doing to rank higher than you? In essence, this would give you the unique ability to emulate their success without reinventing the wheel.
Others believe – that reverse SEO means trying to do damage control. What happens when a search query returns results that are not advantageous to your firm or organization (or you)? Believe it or not, there are companies that will perform online damage control – by attempting to push those unfavorable results down to page 2, 3 or 4 where they won’t be so readily noticed. How? By posting a ton of positive reviews to counter anything negative.
There’s a very informative article on SEO-Hacker entitled, “Reverse SEO” that addresses damage control. In the article, the author identifies what Google lists as unacceptable, so if damaging information listed in those categories is found, you can request that those be de-indexed. The list:
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My confidential, personal information is appearing in search results (e.g. name, address, phone number, medical records)
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A piece of content I am concerned about has already been removed by the webmaster but still appears among the search results
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I have found a site that is engaging in suspicious behavior
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I would like incorrect or inaccurate information to be removed from search results
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My full name or the name of my business appears on an adult content site that’s spamming Google’s search results
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A page appearing in Google’s search results is violating my company’s trademark rights
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One or more pages on my site have been removed due to a legal complaint, and I would like them restored.
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I have a legal issue that is not mentioned above
Clearly, these are fairly obvious, so if damaging information about you or your company shows up on search results, getting these removed should be pretty straight forward. Beyond any doubt, Google has a low view of adult content sites, so those should be addressed quickly.
Another take – on reverse SEO is to just not do any SEO. The angle here is to design sites for your visitors and not for the search engines. This sounds great in theory, but viewing patterns very clearly indicate that you need to be on page one, and the closer to number one, the better. In order to do that, a ton of split testing by the top SEO gurus in the industry attempts to take the guesswork out of what works and what does not work.
How would you discover what these SEO gurus have to offer? Head on over to seo.alltop.com! This site aggregates a myriad of current articles on everything SEO related from PPC tips to what dumb SEO tactics will get your site penalized. Even if you only read one article per day, you’ll be way ahead of the curve.
What’s your take on reverse SEO?
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