What Is Reverse SEO and Why It Won’t Work
Someone recently asked me about “reverse SEO” and whether or not I thought it was a good SEO tactic. I had to be honest and tell them that reverse SEO was not a term I was familiar with (12 years in the Internet marketing and SEO industry and I’m still learning new things!) but that I would look into it and get back to them. Something in my gut was telling me that reverse SEO was probably a grey hat, if not outright black hat, SEO technique.
After doing a little research, the way I came to understand reverse SEO is that it’s the process of analyzing the search results (usually done with an SEO software tool) in Google and Bing and then breaking it down to find out why one site ranks over another. Basically, reverse SEO is trying to quantify SEO; if you get X links from certain sites and write X pages of content and focus on X keywords your site will catapult to the top of the SERPs overnight.
As the owner of a strictly white hat SEO company called Brick Marketing, this is not a process I would ever recommend to any of our full service SEO clients.
Why won’t reverse SEO work?
1. It’s all speculative
There is no formula to SEO that guarantees success. If it were as simple as that then site owners wouldn’t need SEO consultants like me to help guide them through the process. They would just go down the checklist and POOF! find themselves ranking number one. I wish SEO were that simple (and oftentimes people are over thinking it), but it’s not a campaign where you can just plug and play.
2. There are unknown factors
Google has over 200 factors in their ranking algorithm. Some of these we can control (webpage content) and some of them we can’t (age of site). We aren’t even 100% sure of all 200 factors! Google and Bing know that black hat SEO practitioners and spammers are looking for ways to “crack the code” and they aren’t about to let it happen.
I’ve also seen reverse SEO defined as doing everything you can to negatively impact your competition. Instead of trying to build your site up you work to bring other sites down. I actually came across this quote in my research, “To less do we have to make huge spam competitor site with many links to other sites. So Google thinks this site tries to obtain classified by massive spam and if the site is and disappear just the search engines altogether.” Maybe not the most well-written sentence ever, but I took it to mean that this forum member was recommending that site owners create a spam site and link to their competitor’s sites in order to make Google think their competitors where using black hat link building tactics.
However you want to define reverse SEO, either as creating a plug-and-play formula for SEO success OR as trying to sabotage the competition’s own SEO efforts, I would recommend that you steer clear.
2 Responses to “What Is Reverse SEO and Why It Won’t Work”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
I have an SEO tool that does have a component that guages competition, looking at on page factors, links, and age of site, among other things. I’ll admit over the last few weeks I haven’t checked it much. I use it more for analyzing a keyword’s potential (which, I believe, is the intended use for this tool).
I think the 2 biggest keys to getting good rankings is to find a great keyword that is getting a decent amount of searches (I tend to like ones getting at least 1000 broad or 300 exact a month) and then writing content that people searching for those terms would be interested in reading. Focus on that, and letting people know about your site through commenting, guest posting, and sites where bloggers can meet each other and you’ll find that your rankings for those keywords will naturally start going towards the top.
Another practice which could be called Reverse SEO which is definitely a black hat strategy is to influence the number of searches (usually using crowdsourcing or software) to change the number of searches being done and thus influence Googles keyword profile for that search.
Eg. If 100s of people a month are searching for “tall barbie dolls” but you artificially add 100s searching for “green tall barbie dolls” Google will add this to its keyword suggestions and possibly to its search results. This is sometimes used in reputation management.
To me what you are describing is more like “Reverse Engineering SEO” to understand your competition which is a pretty common and standard practice, but by no means a game changer.