Why Big Brands Should Spam Search Engines
February 8, 2006
Imagine for a moment that you are the VP of marketing for one of the world’s most recognizable brands. One of your responsibilities as VP of marketing is to make sure that your brand shows up at the top when the thousands of daily Internet users type your brand names and model numbers into the little white box.
On the surface it sounds like a fairly simple task. But it’s actually much harder than it appears.
Along with having to deal with the pressure of producing the same level of cutting-edge visual designs that your competitors are cranking out, you also have to contend with the fact that there are hundreds of other companies who are actively trying to rank for your brands.
These companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month running ads for your brands. And they also have full-time SEO’s whose sole mission is to dominate every possible SERP containing your brands. When they are successful, they collect information from visitors, (who probably would have preferred to land on your official site) and then sell that information back to you at a ridiculous price.
In the end, showing up for all possible searches simply because you are the brand isn’t guaranteed. Yet the CEO, board of directors and shareholders all demand it. To them, anything less than #1 is simply unacceptable.
So, if you were the one in charge, and you realized you were missing the mark, what would you do?
If it were me, I’d go out and find a competent consultant or firm who would be willing to help me overcome the obstacles that were preventing my company’s web properties from appearing at the top. I wouldn’t really care who is ultimately responsible for the obstacles, because it isn’t important. What’s important is coming up with a solution.
And if that solution involved presenting content to search engine bots that humans don’t see, so be it. Whether or not the solution was inline with a particular search engine’s guidelines wouldn’t even be a factor in my decision. All that I would consider is whether or not the solution would help more people looking for my company’s products actually find them. And if the answer to that question is yes, I’d move forward without any hesitation.
I wouldn’t hesitate because I understand that if a search engine happens to stumble upon what it considers improper SEO techniques all on their own, they will more than likely contact us directly to discuss the matter. Getting kicked out of the database won’t even be a consideration.
If our improper SEO tactics happens to get outed publicly by some gung-ho blogger, or one of the many competitors competing for our terms, I know that all we’ll get is a tiny slap on the wrist to show the world that the particular search engine is serious about web spam. And once our public scolding is completed, we will instantly be allowed to cut to the front of the confessional line.
We’ll be allowed to take cuts because search engines want our sites to show up. They want them to show up because their users expect to see them. And those users don’t give a shit about what’s contained in the source code. All they care about is whether or not they land on a page that matches their search.
Until that fact changes, there will be virtually no risk associated with aggressive SEO for big brands. And as long as the risks are low, managers of big brands would be foolish not to explore potential strategies that will ultimately improve the visibility of their brands simply because a search engine has said they disapprove.
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24 Responses to “Why Big Brands Should Spam Search Engines”
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Very flawed logic.
Assume that your ‘big brand’ adopted blackhat SEO tactics to list better on SERPs. For some time it does well because lot of people searching for particular words land up on your site. However after some time your tactics are discovered by search engine algorithms or by a blogger and the search engine decides to delist you. If you want to be reincluded in their index you have to remove the blackhat tricks. You do so. Then what? You cannot use the blackhat tactics again. And you have to fall back on whitehat changes to your site to make sure it ranks well in SERPs. So why not do it in the first place?
make spam - be catched - make a hype - earn traffic and get plenty of great links from well-known/reputable sources. great strategy
As a searcher I would expect BMW to come top of the rankings for a search on BMW, which puts Google in a bind as if they ban BMW they are not satisfying me as a searcher. However, if I put my webmaster hat on then this is totally out of order.
It’s three in a bed action.
The searcher, the search engine and the searched. And you know how awkward that can be
Not everyone reaches the same level of satisfaction
Well said, Greg.
Search engines do play favorites, regardless what they say publicly. But it’s got to be that way to meet searchers expectations.
If Google kicked Microsoft.com out of their results, that could lead to people switching engines when they can’t find useful information any longer. It’s in their best interest to have that (among others) large brand in their index to deliver relevant results, regardless if the site is doing “bad things” to get their ranking where it should be.
Oh, if only we were all an Amazon.com of the world…
All I can say, Greg, is: RESPECT!
Only You can say it like this and you are so right.
I have had many meetings over the years with managers of very big brands and one word I have never heard is: Ethics. I’ve heard words like: Results, time line, ROI and ROMI, competitors and consumers (and a few more obscene words I won’t mention here) but never “ethics” - it’s just not on the agenda.
One big question, though, I’ve heard more than a few times from larger brands is: Are we big enough to be “safe”? To that, I am still not allways 100% sure - especially when it comes to larger companies outside the US. Maybe Google could issue a “Large Brand Whitelist” for us - wouldn’t that make the whole deal a lot easier? LOL
One thing is for sure, Google just gave every Fortune 1000 Marketing VP the green light to spam.
CEO: So let me get this straight… we can use these strategies and if we get caught we can drop them and be back where we were the next day?
Marketing VP: Yessir.
CEO: So why did you think it was worth my time to even discuss this? You know, I’m very disappointed in you, you’ll certainly never make it to President, you wuss.
Good points Greg, I would agree that what you are inferring regarding BMW is an example of a light slap on the wrist. But as Brian says above, what about the “little man” that may not get the benefit of receiving direct contact prior to penalization? Is this level of brand respect only reserved for Fortune 500? 1000?
Are you sure about that?
Let’s look at some additional facts from this case:
According to my German friends who are in the know when it comes to SEO, the pages that were outed were up for at least two years.
Obviously, two years ago the company could have made the commitment to completely rebuild the site in a way that would conform to the “rules.” But doing that would be very expensive and it would require convincing a lot of people within the company that the expense would be justified. Even if they could convince the proper people, they probably wouldn’t be close to being finished with the changes at this point.
So instead, they decide to go with a much cheaper “plan B”. Plan B’s are easy to get approved because they don’t require a great deal of commitment from people within the company. (Other than uploading the files).
Plan B turns out to be a huge success in terms of traffic. And it runs for a solid two years. When it gets caught, the whole site is removed for two days, and then it goes back to being just the way it was before Plan B was implemented.
So for the total cost of two days of traffic, they are able to collect tons of data that will help them accurately determine wheter or not investing the cash to rebuild all their properties is really worth it. If the data shows that it is indeed worth it, they now have the ammunition they need to cut the typical 6-18 month approval time in half.
In the end, they come out ahead no matter what.
Very well put article Greg, as usual. I have to agree with brian mark that no matter what, google had to play favorites with that brand. In the end BMW picked up 2 years of quality traffic and the data you mentioned from it before having to remove the “plan b” strategy, and the total cost was a few days traffic. Not a bad scenario for them at all when it played out.
I’m certainly not advocating that the “little man” adopt a similar strategy as the “big men.” Of course, the little man will be wiped off the face of the planet for the same type of infraction.
Typically, I’d say yes. But there are exceptions. WordPress certainly isn’t a brand that most regular citizens know about. But its popularity within the geek open source community is high enough to warrant similar treatment. The WordPress crowd tends to be quite vocal and they also have been quite loyal to Google. It wouldn’t make much sense to prevent all those people from finding wordpress.org
Greg - you forgot one piece that makes this even more attractive to BMW… The link love that comes as a result of spamming and being caught. I can’t count the number of links that have come from this story, but it must be in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. With link love like that as a “punishment,” I’d spam every day!
Greg,
I think you are missing a crucial part of the BMW story.
Nobody buys BMWs because they stumbled on the company’s Website.
This is, for the most part, a status symbol we are talking about. The vast majority of people I know who own BMWs were influenced by the long legacy of offline branding.
This is a high consideration purchase for a well established brand, and your advice could cause far more damaage to a big brand than good, because you haven’t looked at a realistic business case.
How much money do you think BMW would lose (in your worse case scenario), wherein the competition, who is spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars a month” for high brand visibility, would really cause BMW?
Furthermore, your statement that “Whether or not the solution was inline with a particular search engine’s guidelines wouldn’t even be a factor in my decision” is in arrogant disregard of the historic work the company’s marketers have done establishing their brand, not to mention introducing compromised ethics into a marketing plan that hasn’t even looked at the essential first step of creating a business case for SERP brand positioning.
Great post Greg. As a online company with very little “branding,� we are forced to adopt conservative optimization strategies while the bigger companies in our space can do what they want because they will get that “courtesy call� before their site comes down.
Sad thing is, I can see why Google makes those calls to the big companies before their sites get wiped off the map. When you type in BMW and BMW doesn’t come up, that is a problem for the search engine, not BMW. People don’t just assume that BMW doesn’t have a site just because it doesn’t appear in Google’s results – they just figure there is a problem with Google.
So the little guys will keep chugging along while the big guys run to the front of the line. It might not me “fair� to the small guys, but since when did Google start caring about the small guys?
And I am with Randfish - if I could get punished with IBLs, I would get in trouble all the time!
Craig makes a very good point. When promoting a prestige brand the highest priority should be given to not damaging that brand.
This marketting tactic may have given BMW two years of good google hits, but at the same time it has severely damaged the brand. Because of this people will think of the variety of criminal actions that are associated with SPAM when they think of BMW.
I just visited http://www.bmw.com with Konqueror (the KDE web browser), it displayed a message informing me that the BMW web designers don’t like my browser and refuse to write standards compliant web pages that support it. So much for a prestige brand.
http://www.mazda.com works better than the other car company web sites in my browser and they don’t have a history of spamming. The BMW people should try competing with the Japanese…
You know, I hear that argument all the time. Yet I’ve never heard anyone making that argument give any kind of concrete example of a brand that was significantly damaged because of aggessive SEO tactics.
How exactly has BMW suffered? Are sales down? has their stock took a dive? Do you really think people walking onto a BMW lot are deciding to buy a Mercedes instead because BMW used some doorway pages and a little JavaScript on their German site?
What about State Farm Insurance, Barnes & Noble, L.L. Bean, or eToys? They all got busted doing things far worse than what BMW did. Which one of them suffered significant “brand damage?”
Or what about eBay and Amazon? Their army of search spammers have been caught and flogged publicly many times. How is it that those two companies have managed to become two of the most recognizable brands in the world if search engine spam has such a negative impact on brand perception?
Greg,
You are limiting your point about brand perception to the external.
The large brands I have worked with are neurotic about perception, to the point where, as I heard an SEM firm state at SES last summer, “95% of the SEO project with a F1000 is change management”.
They have rigid policies in place to maintain their brand. I had to read a 35 page manual that outlined color palettes, writing styles (with many samples), criteria for image selection, and much, much more. Getting them to do simple things like internal text linking can take months for approval, and several more to move into production.
I have worked with about 15 big brands (I believe 5 are F1000) and I can tell you that absolutely none of them would approve of an SEO technique that could get them removed. To go down that road without getting their approval is a dishonest business practice, whether you think it right or not. I think you’d agree with me on that (or at least I hope you would!).
Which is why I retired from the corporate SEO game. But that’s a whole other story.
I’ve certainly worked with some big brands who match that description. But for everyone who took that position there were one or two that were fine with the BMW approach. Agressive corporate SEO is more common than you might think.
On this point, we completely agree. Any SEO who adopts a “Plan B” strategy without full disclosure to the client should be strung up and shot. But that isn’t what happened in this case. BMW was clearly aware of the strategy. And I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of other brands who got caught were also completely aware of the SEO tactics being used.
I’ve done a ton of that kind of work in the past (although none of my clients ever got caught) and I can tell you that the pressure to go down that road always came from within. The common attitude was that if they got the boot, they’d just make a phone call and say they were sorry.
I agree and disagree with Greg here.
I spend much time investigating and sending seize and desist to blogs, sites and whatnot that are actively leaching off our brand. It is not a good thing cause it’s dilluting our SERPS.
However, if a large company are allowed to employ black hat techniques on their brand and get away with it, what’s stopping them from employing similar tactics on off brand products? That’s what I have a problem with.
Radisson SAS got banned for over 2 months in 2004 for redirects and doorway pages with duplicate content(incidentally SEOed by Netpointers, the same company behind BWM and Porsche).
One year after, I did a quick check, and the banning certainly didn’t stop them from further expanding this strategy. And they are not primarily targeting their brand.
As an example, they have over 40 pages with identical content targeted over 40 different phrases on two hotels in my home town in Norway: http://www.seobomb.com/radisson-sas-busted-for-black-hat-seo-again/
This can hardly be called protecting your brand - this is just pure SE spam.
Sverre
For the record, Netpointers is denying that BMW was ever a client.
I wasn’t aware of that. However, I find it somewhat odd that a company besides Netpointer would leave a footprint identical to other Netpointer customers:
http://www.netpointers-technologies.com/com/com/cases/case_studies__1/case_wonderful_copenhagen
Then do a np_dk site:visitcopenhagen.dk
Sverre
Correction…denying BMW, fair enough.
The footprints I was referring to was on Porsche, and they’re obviously not denying that…
Sorry. My bad.
Sverre
> The footprints I was referring to was on Porsche, and they’re obviously not denying that…
You obviously did not bother to follow the link Greg gave and read the statement - they deny having Porshe.dk as a client too.
I think you should be more carefull in your SEO witch-hunt and what you claim about other companies in public. Making such false statement is not only MUCH more unethical than any (so-called) search engine spam will ever be, in my book, it is also illegal.
I have worked with a great deal of very large brands too and I have to agree with Greg that the request to move to more agressive SEO has always come from inside the companies - AND, it is indeed more comon than you think. The engines and the press usually only find the most blatant (and simple) spam - NOT the more advanced and more “well secured” stuff.
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