Siteground.com and Search Results Domination

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about how important it was to fill the search engine rankings with positive mentions of your company. Its one of the cornerstones of online reputation management and can help to filter out bad news about your company.

A few people have asked for examples of those techniques and I found a great one today. Siteground is a hosting company that targets the Open Source niche. They offer middle-of-the-road prices and like many other companies they manage servers at the ThePlanet.com. They do offer fast answers to support tickets, but generally they offer the same product as many other companies. So, how do they fill the search engine results with their company and drive more customers than their rivals?

Siteground’s Hosting “Review” Sites

One of their main strategies is to build a large number of extra sites that appear to be a neutral hosting review site, but are in fact simply lead generators:

• Drupalhosting.net (#1 on Google for “Drupal Hosting”)
• Mambo-hosting-directory.com
• Oscommerce-hosting-directory.com (#5 on Google for “OSCommerce Hosting”)
• Forum-hosting-directory.com (#8 on Google for “Forum Hosting”)
• Blog-hosting-directory.com
• Wikihosting.net

How You Can Tell They Belong to Siteground?

• Siteground are the (*cough*) best-reviewed host on each site.
• There aren’t any live links to any other host.
• They chose small, no-name hosts to list alongside their own ads. No big brand names to catch the visitors eye.
• All the sites are on the main Sitegrounds servers: NS1.CLEV1.NET and NS2.CLEV1.NET
• Each site is linked to all the others via the footer.
• They used the same designer who does the Joomla templates distributed on Siteground.com.