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Most of us in business know enough about building SEO to get by or at least not embarrass ourselves when the marketing team starts throwing acronyms around the conference room. For most, it’s simply keeping up with keywords, tagging social media and website pages with query terms, paying for some rankings, earning more organically and monitoring search engine results pages to see how close you are to the top and your competitors.
But do you know about the dark and rapidly growing side of SEO?
Despite over 20 years as a marketing executive embracing new technologies as a practitioner and thought leader, I was unprepared for how quickly the marketing tech (MarTech) we use for good became the catalyst for so much bad.
Recently, I was involved in pitching marketing services to an investment fund that wanted to accelerate revenue quickly for acquisitions. As I always do, I looked under the hood to understand the businesses so I could craft highly relevant recommendations for lead generation and sales. Something odd popped up as quickly as popping the hood on my SUV. Every company in this portfolio had the same name and a very similar URL as an established competitor offering the same products to the same verticals, sending me a trigger alert for potential trademark and SEO infringement, both of which can build brands quickly and cheaply stealing hard-earned and costly marketing returns from other companies. While aware of black hat SEO and identity theft aligned with phishing scams, I was not aware of how common dark marketing tactics have become.
Unfortunately, in a world where good technology quickly enables bad deeds, monitoring your brand identity and SEO safety needs to be as common as monitoring traffic, leads and conversions from your marketing programs. Here are just a few actions to take to protect your brand.
Related: ‘We Pulled Off An SEO Heist’: This Entrepreneur Stole 3.6 Million Pageviews From Competitors — And Your Business Could Be Next.
Brandjacking
Brandjacking is more than setting up a fake site for a big brand like Norton or Netflix and then telling customers to update their payment information, which is then stolen by thieves behind the fake sites. It is also about branding a business with a similar identity and URL to another business to confuse customers about who is who with the intent to direct consumers looking for competitors’ websites to your site. Many consumers and algorithms don’t know the difference between URLs that are nearly identical. When this happens, money and effort spent managing keywords, tagging sites, crafting content, paying for Google Ads and more can actually benefit a dark competitor who does nothing but divert others’ heard-earned web traffic to their sites.
You can often detect potential brandjacking when a competitor pops up with a name and URL that are very similar to yours. Compare ABCtechnologies.com vs. ABCtechnologies1.com. Algorithms may miss tiny differences and serve up imposter URLs to your target customers regardless of how much you spend on SEO.
What you need to do to protect yourself
- Continuously monitor URLs in your space and note any highly similar ones. You can do this by frequently checking SERPs for your brand and logging into hosting companies’ pages to see what similar URLs are taken. If you find similar URLs, try to identify company executives to whom you can reach out regarding your trademark rights. If there is malicious intent, you likely won’t find the names of executives on the site or social media.
- Pay attention to branding that reflects yours. There can be more than one company named ABC Technologies, LLC, and that does not necessarily indicate intent to commit wrongdoing. If there is overlap in products and industries served and signs of brand confusion, there are several sites you can use to see where they are registered and who the agents are.
- If you suspect you are a victim of intentional trademark and/or SEO infringement, you can take legal action against that brand to ensure they do not confuse your target customers and poach your sales in addition to your identity.
Is your SEO at risk of being stolen?
You may have read the story here on Entrepreneur.com last June about the great “SEO Heist” of 2023 and how the agency behind it bragged about stealing more than 3.6 million traffic hits from a competitor over a matter of months. There’s been quite a flurry of reaction to this announcement, some unscrupulously wanting to do it themselves and others disgusted that AI, automation and other tools are being used for outright theft. I will always stand with the latter. SEO heists often involve scraping your website’s site menu and links, duplicating URLs for blogs and landing pages, engaging AI to write keyword-laden articles that support your stolen content, and more. Consumers do not always know the difference and may think they purchased from you when they instead purchased from a hijacker they should not trust.
Thankfully, these threats are being exposed, but that does not mean business managers are prepared to protect their branding and SEO efforts against internet pirates. Here are three ways to determine if your SEO is at risk of being stolen.
- Monitor your website traffic continuously. If you see unexplained dips despite no change in behavior on your part, you could be the victim of a heist.
- Go to the content pages of brands with names and URLs similar to yours and see how closely their content, third-party links, and landing page URLs mimic yours. Take note. Report any suspicions to Google, which is committed to identifying black hatters using its platform and shutting down algorithms accordingly.
- Check with Google to see if they detect any abnormalities in your web traffic and redirections for your backlinks. Report any suspected issues to Google. Here’s a summary of some actions Google takes to ensure a fair and safe SEO environment.
Related: 9 SEO Tips to Help You Rank No. 1 on Google in 2024
Marketing technology makes whitehat, ethical and earned paid and organic SEO easier to achieve, execute and monitor than ever. There are many ways to keep tabs on the impact of your keywords and those used by your competitors in a fair, ethical and legal way. You can read about these affordable tactics in Entrepreneur’s new book, Market Your Business – Your Guide to DIY Marketing, available on amazon.com, bn.com and more. There is never a reason to resort to black hat SEO. In fact, the campaign mentioned in the “SEO Heist” article referenced above crashed — and crashed hard. According to this article on LinkedIn and others, the long-term damage was greater than the gain.
AI provides many powerful tools to make marketing and growth initiatives work better and faster. But it’s also a great example of a failure of success. The failure is that this technology can be used for nefarious activities, and there are many out there who will do so. By following the steps in this article, you can set yourself up to recognize issues and correct them.
