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Let’s face it, business is dirty – especially internet business. Therefore, this article explains how companies have legally screwed their competitors by using good old traditional SEO.

These are some dirty tactics I’ve witnesses in the corporate world.

For starters, pick your biggest competitor, go to Google and type in their company name. Inspect result pages #1-3, and take note of what’s showing up on it. What you’ll usually see is the company at page 1, position 1, and most likely their social networking accounts, and maybe even a few local business listings and review sites that reference them (CitySearch, Yelp.com, SuperPages, etc.) trailing right underneath it. If you’re REALLY lucky, you might see a customer complaint, angry blog post or something similar – this is the focus of this article!

SEO’ing Bad Reviews

You may have already “caught my drift” after reading that previous paragraph. What you’ll want to do is SEO the living hell out of those customer complaint reviews. The ones that typically appear high in search engines are from sites like RipoffReport.com and ConsumerAffairs.com. You might even find a few negative reviews from the ever-popular Yahoo Answers, which gets surprisingly high search engine placements in the long-run. Bookmark any of these results into a new folder within your browser right away. If you haven’t found anything negative appearing in SERPs, visit these sites and search for your competitor’s name, and bookmark all of the negative reviews. Another good way to find these reviews is to do a Google search for “(company name) sucks.”

A little friendly tip about Yelp…a Yelp review can appear as the Meta Description for a Yelp company page in a search engine result if it is considered significant enough. You can help specific Yelp reviews appear higher by building links to them. Visit the Yelp page of your competitor and look for a negative review, then copy and paste the link under it that says “bookmark,” and point backlinks to it.

Once you’ve amassed a good amount of these negative reviews, it’s time to start building links to them. Use social bookmarking sites like Delicious.com, Diigo, Faves.com, Kirtsy, Mister Wong, Mixx and Yahoo Bookmarks – they give the best return in a day of age where bookmarking sites mean little in a backlinking campaign. Then, Digg and Stumble the article. Do all of these things over a spread of a few weeks – don’t do it all at once, or it might look suspicious to search engines.

The Fake Review

If you’d like to take this game a step further, write articles about your competitor, talking down about their service. You already know about them, since you’re a marketer and know the details of your competition’s weakness. Don’t go too overboard, but give a written opinion about their weaknesses or service flaws. Sound honest, not obvious. Write one article, then paraphrase it several times. Strive for titles like “(Company Name) Review,” “Thanks for nothing, (Company Name),” or anything else that sounds controversial, interesting or otherwise click-worthy to any potential customer who is doing a background check on your competitor on the internet.

Submit the original article you’ve written to EZine Articles, and the paraphrased version (one each) to sites like Hubpages, Squidoo, Blogspot and WordPress.com. The purpose of doing this is so that they all have a chance of being indexed and appearing in search engine results, instead of being ignored for being duplicate content. Bookmark these articles on the aforementioned services from my previous paragraph. Remember, don’t do this all at once — but over the course of a week or two, just to be safe.

You can even be creative, and make one of your articles have more importance by pointing a backlink from the other articles to the first one, giving it more backlinks and a higher chance of appearing for a term. You can also bookmark just that one single article to give it even more weight. This is just another option, and your results may vary.

Marveling at Your SEO Smear Campaign

So, what you have now is a SEO campaign for existing 3rd party articles on the internet which bash your competition, as well as a slew of new ones you’ve written, which (hopefully) sound convincing and don’t look like an angry competitor trying to get an e-advantage. Keep this one tidbit of info in mind: anyone who searches for a company name is probably putting words like “review,” “recommendation” or “testimonials” in their keyword terms, or are typing in something like “is company XYZ good?” to see what comes up.

Be sure to consult Google Keyword Tool to do some background info, and get insight into what people are typing. Regardless, these negative/controversial/interesting articles will appear to the viewer’s eye like a neon sign. It’s exactly what EVERY consumer on earth wants to know: the negative parts about a company. Would you pour hundreds of dollars or precious time into a service without reading all of the negative reviews about it that you could? Of course not.

If you’re extremely lucky, you’ll start seeing either some of the existing negative review articles or the ones you’ve written to be climbing their way up the SERPs. Either that, or the social bookmarking bookmarks themselves will appear high in SERPs (Digg typically does, for low-competition keywords). Once this happens, human curiosity will take care of the rest. Customers will start clicking that link, ignoring your competitor’s home page.

After all, they already know what will happen after they click the link for a corporation’s home page…BUT…they have no idea what’s in store when they see a link about a negative article about that company, and will be MORE than willing to find out. The more people click that link, the higher it will go since frequent, sporadic SERP clicks are a small slice of the Google algorithm. As months go by, these negative articles might start appearing for company name keyword searches themselves, rather than just for “company name sucks” or “company name review” searches.

My multi-national, billion dollar company was suffering because of a stupid Geocities page that bashed us. It had a witty title, and people kept clicking it when searching for our single-word company name. It eventually made it to Google page 1, #2, right under our own name. Yikes!

To conclude, this is by no means “nice” or “honest.” It’s a really shitty thing to do to your competitor. However, if you’re the “gloves off” kind of internet marketer, you won’t care about being nice, making the SEO Smear Campaign strategy quite attractive. If you’re a good enough copywriter, you might even be able to tactfully sneak in a recommendation to use YOUR company’s service at the end of these articles, without looking like a blatant bastard or angry competitor. In doing so, you’re not only rubbing your competitor’s face in the dirt, but setting forth a subtle “pull” strategy in an attempt to give your company new sales leads!