Update: I found this amazing SWTOR strategy guide! Check it out:
The best, awesomest, totally legit Star Wars: The Old Republic strategy guide. I kid you not. (Click the image)
There’s also an affiliate program for it which is kind of interesting. More on this in a future post that will explain this update to those interested in the SEO aspects of the SWTOR strategy guide.
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As a huge Star Wars fan I’m pretty excited about the official release of SWTOR, or Star Wars the Old Republic. I think it’ll be a great game and overtake WoW in a short amount of time. How does this relate to SEO? Well I was searching for the best class to play and what the differences were when I stumbled across a site that turns out to be a great case study in SEO.
My exact search terms were “swtor class videos”. I dug deep, to about the 20th result where I saw this:
For whatever reason, I visited it and knew what I was dealing with immediately: The classic spam/affiliate site: http://www.swtorstrategyguide.net/ Let’s dig in to what they’re doing and how they’re doing well. Here’s what it looks like:
Click to enlarge
On the main page they have a lot of great keyword rich SWTOR-related content. In the right sidebar they have tons of links to popular SWTOR categories or things that they think would be common search terms, I.E. “SWTOR Strategy Guide”, “SWTOR Datacron Locations”, “SWTOR Flashpoints”. Each one of those pages has some good content – mind you, not necessarily informative text for the user. That is, it’s very basic. Someone might read through this site for a while but likely won’t find what they’re looking for.
The whole goal is just to get traffic there. The content is for search engines, not humans. Then they refer people to another site for what they’re selling – their SWTOR Mastery Guide.
If we pull up the site in Open Site Explorer we see they have a Page authority of 45 and a Domain Authority of 35. They also have a lot of backlinks: 56 linking root domains and 123 total links. That’s pretty good, and a large part of why they rank well.
Looking at some of the backlinking sites, we see ioonos.com. This is almost certainly spun article text. That is – they took one piece of content and, using article spinning, created dozens, perhaps hundreds of version of the same article. Then they posted it to various sites, all linking back to their main site.
Here’s another one of their sites: http://imwithdorothy.info/ As you can see, they have tons of topics about everything under the sun, all linking to some kind of affiliate marketing site. By looking at how oddly the text reads, we know the text was spun with some words replaced with synonyms that sometimes don’t fit quite perfectly. Here’s a snippet:
My View
I used to think this sort of thing was sick. Who would do such a thing? I equated them with the lowest of the low – spammers were villians, criminals almost in my book.
But upon further review, yes, they’re gaming the system. But it’s the system that sucks, not necessarily the spammers. How does Google let these guys get away with it? Surely there are ways to tell crap content and content farms from real sites, right? Apparently not. Or perhaps the search engines choose to look the other way (i.e. it’s about money?)
If these spammers/affiliate marketers can do it and make money, we can certainly gain from these tactics as well. I’m not saying go all out black hat SEO, but perhaps we can sprinkle in some grey hat linkbuilding.
Agree/disagree? How can we do linkbuilding better than this?
Good luck in all your SEO endeavors!
