One of the recent rash of Radio advertisers nationally is a company that offers to “defend your reputation” by manipulating search engine results. They go far enough in the ads to explain that their goal is not to cause your web page to go up, bu to get the search engines to drop the “bad” information so you can protect your “reputation” – from past customers or clients who think you cheated them or gave you bad service. Talk about devaluating a concept.
I know quite a bit about SEO though I never made a career over it. Google has a really thorny problem, and these “reputation” defenders are putting Google in a box.
Google wants to keep the “junk” out of the search results. Its visitors want the junk out of Google’s results. So Google constantly refines its process to identify “junk” and suppress it.
So how do you convince Google to push the “junk” off the first few pages of the search results? You fool Google into thinking that the complaint about your dentist double billing your insurance company is actually “junk”. How do you do that? You pretend you are tring to draw traffic to the web site engaging in “bad” activity and point links at it.
There are large “web farms” out there, mostly being used by porn companies, casinos, fake viagra, etc… So you just get those web sites to add a link pointing to your competitor, Google decides your competitor is involved in kiddie porn, and like magic you defend your own “reputation” as the non-kiddie-porn dentist.
Here is an example of a more technically sneaky way – I’m sure there are lots of people that do this stuff all day long, trying to do SED
http://www.curiousinternet.com/p/seo-cheats.html
This involves setting up a proxy server to trick Googlebot into thinking you are the real web site when you are just a copy that you control – and then telling Google it should not index the web site. Googe then (at least temporarily) “obeys” the instruction to not index the real web site.