Monday, August 6, 2007

Online Marketing: Digging the Competition

This is a terrible, nasty, devious, evil technique that I am ashamed to even post. I am compelled because someone, I’m sure, already has posted it and others will follow. That doesn’t make it right, but at least it justifies my intentions in my own mind and makes me feel better about myself.

Digg your competors. No, not their websites. Most companies have someone who has had a bad personal experience in their dealings. The internet, which is often a place for people to vent publicly, likely has a documented incident that they do not want read by many.

Even better, if you can find a news report about them that portrays them in a bad light, you want that up there.

Best possible scenario, there is a court document out there that truly is “dirt” against them.

Find these stories, pages, documents, whatever. Research them and see how old they are. Brand new posts are often not the best, as they do not have enough history in Google to do well. Try to find something that is not too old that it no longer applies, but that is old enough to have been indexed and perhaps even linked to from other sites.

Digg it. Furl it. StumbleUpon it. Reddit, del.icio.us, simpy – all fair game. The key is to make the title of the Digg or tag or seed the name of the company. You will have a hard time getting to the top spot if they optimize their website at all, but you may get on the front page, even as high as number 2.

Man, it’s dirty. Really, really filthy as a technique, but if I didn’t post it, someone else would have. Heck, I’m sure it’s been posted a hundred times. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself so I can sleep at night.



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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is just evil enough that it may just do the trick. I am not looking to paint competitors in a bad light, but I did get scammed and am looking to publicize that fact.

Hunter Green said...

It works. I hate it, and it scares me, but it works.

search engine placement said...

Try to find something that is not too old, that is no longer valid, but is big enough to be indexed, and perhaps links to other sites.