When National Companies Try to Appear Local Online

As a local business owner you work hard to reach prospects in your geographic area. Your website, social media, and search marketing all promote your services locally. It can be frustrating to see larger, often national, brands outrank you organically in your area, especially when the brands aren’t local at all.

In some cases, these brands are doing a great job of search experience marketing. A select few brands may be doing more, though, and utilizing what we call “Black Hat SEO” to game search engines into thinking they’re local businesses with offices in your area. How do these brands game the system? How can you spot one of these sites? And what hope do local business owners have when bigger brands do this?

Why do some brands use Black Hat SEO?

For some people search engine optimization is only about being on the top of the first page of search results. What else is it about you may ask? Well in reality SEO should be about people, the flesh and blood visitors of Google or other search engines finding the right match to what they are looking for.

Black Hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO techniques that focus only on tricking a search engine’s algorithm – not benefiting the human audience. Google has a Webspam Team, led by Googler Matt Cutts, who constantly fight these Black Hat techniques so that Google can provide a quality user experience to searchers. The Webspam team also provides guidance of how to play by the rules so that legitimate (aka White Hat) SEO pros can improve rankings in line with Google’s policies.

Some techniques a brand that uses Black Hat SEO may use are to create duplicate “spammy” webpages and unnatural links for a number of geographic areas. Google makes it clear that duplicate content and unnatural links are against their rules however it can still lead to immediate traffic gains so some brands are willing to risk their reputation with Google with these and other tactics.

What should I look for if I suspect that a brand is using black hat SEO on its website?

We should note that there is no all-encompassing example of black hat SEO though keyword stuffing and duplicate content are two of the most prominent examples. Keyword stuffing is the now outdated practice of stuffing a landing page full of relevant keywords. This tactic actually worked years ago but now, as Google has changed its algorithms, it works less and less. Duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like—content between two pages is identical. For example, a website may maintain separate pages for Farmington and for Newington but these pages are identical except for the town names. These landing pages will often sport the same URLs over and over again wherein only the town name changes. For example “http://ift.tt/1oWYJJQ” becomes “http://ift.tt/1oWYJJV and so forth.

What penalties does Google inflict on brands once it discovers that they have been using black hat SEO?

As mentioned above Google has a team of Webspam experts who find examples of ‘spammy’ websites and tactics. They work with other teams at Google to update Google’s Algorithm to stop rewarding these sites with high rank. To say Google is constantly addressing these and other search concerns is no exaggeration. In 2012 alone Google updated its algorithm 665 times. In addition to these algorithmic changes they also often take manual action, marking individual domains for removal. This is referred to as being blacklisted by Google and once blacklisted it is very difficult to return. This is perhaps the biggest reason why local businesses should never, ever use Black Hat SEO to get ahead.

As you can see some brands use Black Hat SEO to outrank their smaller, local rivals. Thankfully whatever advantage these brands have is only temporary. A well optimized website, complete with great content spread across multiple pages, is the best way for a local brand to stand out amongst much larger national competition. In our next post we’ll examine more ways in which local businesses can fight back and regain a strong organic ranking against bigger national rivals.

When National Companies Try to Appear Local Online