How To Game Google SERPS

Disclaimer:  I do not  recommend you try this technique outlined below.  I am explaining it for the sake of demonstration, and I do not condone this type of search engine "gaming".   Hopefully the more cases like this we expose, the better Google can make their search results.

UPDATE:  The following site was finally busted by Google and removed from SERPs.  Good work Google!  It is great to see karma catch up with the bad guys for once!  Victory for us good guys!  =)

Yesterday I came across Eric Lander's post "Ranting: Google & Online Reputation Management".  In the comments section of the post an interesting discussion took off regarding the consumer complaint sites mentioned in his post, and how they seem to litter serps results much like Wikipedia does.

I decided to take a closer look at one of the sites Eric mentions, PissedConsumer.com.  

Within minutes I was able to identify a link farm created by PissedConsumer that seemed to consist of at least 50-100 domains, if not more (I grew bored of copying and pasting them).  In this link farm they consistently link back to their main site by using sub-domains (ie - dell.pissedconsumer.com, hp.pissedconsumer.com, geico.pissedconsumer.com, etc).  

Here are just a few sites in their link farm I found:

• writecomplaint.com
  
• upsetclient.com
  
• upsetshopper.com
  
• pleasedconsumer.com
  
• reviews-by-company.blogspot.com
  
• bankerreviews.com
  
• a380reviews.com
  
• anotherreview.com
  
• clientstory.com
  
• customer-story.com
  
• corpreviews.com
  
• financingreviews.com
  
• shopperstory.com
  
• healthrunner.com
  
• hithealth.com
  

The funny part is they actually start the link farm out from their own homepage… See their “Our Friends” section.

From there, each site links to a few other sites in the link farm.  And so on and so on.  I never reached the "end" of the link farm, so there could be more than 100 sites.

Interestingly they make no effort to conceal the fact that they are all pointing links back to the parent site, PissedConsumer.com.  Every one of these blogs has the exact same format/template, and every one of them links back to the parent site using sub-domain links.

To make matters even more interesting, all of these sites in their link farm reside on the same IP address (69.72.137.86).

If I was able to find all this in about 15 minutes, how is it that Google cannot figure it out? Perhaps there may be a loophole in their algorithm regarding links using subdomains?  From past threads I've read about how Google views subdomains as separate domains.  This may be the trick being used to get around their spam filter.

Another tactic they are using evolves around Blogger domains.  Here is just a small sample I found:

• home-design-review.blogspot.com
  
• internet-reports.blogspot.com
  
• appliancereports.blogspot.com
  
• travelreportsreviews.blogspot.com
  
• electronics-reports.blogspot.com
  
• carandtruckreport.blogspot.com

Each of these Blogger sites cleverly links EVERY keyword they are targeting back to their main site, PissedConsumer.com.  They throw in a legitimate link to the real site of the company they are targeting every now and then, but 99% of the links you find on these blogs all point back to PissedConsumer.com.

They are obviously doing something right, Quantcast claims they are pulling in 400,000+ visitors/month.  And for the handful of queries we tested, they seemed to always land in the coveted top ten of serps:

1. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=expedia+complaints
   
2. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lowes+complaints
   
3. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=office+depot+complaints
   
4. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=home+depot+complaints

If the site was being penalized for gaming serps, they shouldn't be showing in the top ten for every search we tried in their niche. 

Seems like a problem when it is this easy to game the system.