Parasite SEO and Reputation Management

A post made by Micheal Martinez over at SEOmoz. For a while a few words rolled around in my head:

You see, I happen to be very good at reputation management. That means I can propel 10, 20, 30 Web sites into the top results for all sorts of search expressions. And when you ask me for a link to site X, you tell me exactly who to knock down. If I were to do this to you, I’d take your competitors down, too.

Aside from being a tad boastful (instantly dominating the entire niche? o rly?), it showed me a framework for practically applying concepts I’d recently blogged about, and most importantly, it challenged me. Could I come up with 30 different ways to create potentially niche busting instant ranks?

The easy stuff is the pure parasite SEO:
1) Craigslist: Optimize a post for your target keywords, wait a few days. Bam! Repeat in a few weeks, ’cause CL expires old ads. I bet there are other online classifieds out there you could do this to, but craigslist ranks fast and high. Oh, and there are lots of craigslists.

2) Wikipedia: Create or edit a post about your target, try to make it read as well as possible, and include the relevant keywords. It helps if you have an established wikipedia persona.

3) Forums: Either start your own thread on relevant forums, or find one that already ranks for similar keywords. Optimize your posts to rank well. You may need to repeat this process depending on when the site demotes old entries. It helps in forums also to be a recognizeable member, probably less so than wikipedia however.

4) Blog Comments: Find other people’s blogs related to your target keyword. Find the post most optimized for your target keyphrase already and add an optimized comment. Especially if you don’t post links, this can be pretty easy, just be sure to make the comment useful and long.

5) Indymedia: I almost hate to say this, but if you can spin your message into some sort of political screed or call to action you can post it to one (or all) of the many indymedia sites around the world, and it’ll rank decently.

and of course:
6) Your Sites: Publish optimzed pages on all of your sites. Most SEO’s could probably do 30+ sites like this, but would they all rank well for your target keyword?

Then the more traditional public relations/marketing type stuff.

7) Press Release: Release an optimzed press release. The wire service’s copy will rank for a little while, but the real value comes in which sites pick the story up and carry it themselves. The more newsworthy the release, the more coverage it will get, and the more sites will rank for your target keywords with your message.

Linkbait: Besides the actual ranks you create on your sites by posting to them, you can create viral/linkbait messages and the high-profile sites that post about it will rank for your target keywords… if the optimized portion of your message is what the other sites publish.

And there’s a few ways to just pay for it.

9) Sponsored Posts: Use payperpost to buy some blog posts, optimize your offer and link text to your target keywords.

10) Rent-a-Page: Pay owners of other, well ranking sites, to host a page for you on their domain.

I’ve only got 10 so far, but remember each one of these can potentially create a bunch of rankings. One tactic alone could net you 30. I’ll keep working on this list, but I’d love to hear your suggestions.