SEO Speedwagon

While I typically find sports metaphors trite and unimaginative, this one works fairly well, so I beg indulgence. The pharmaceutical game has always been considered a pretty cutthroat environment in organic SERPs, and that's still the case today. Some sites are using the equivalent of offensive linemen to penetrate an otherwise difficult defense and make room for their own site to squeeze through the gap.

Here's the philosophy: If your site can't rank by itself for certain queries, use the broad back of an established site to knock some of the weaker sites down the SERP to make room for themselves.

Take a random but popular drug -- Cialis. The query for [cialis] shows two such instances on the first page of results, in spots 8 and 10.

First case: Alexa
So how does Alexa fit into the Cialis game? The folks at pillls-deals.com (which is where pillsdeals.com redirects) spread guestbook and comment spam across 20,000+ sites and link to ... not their own site, but the Alexa profile page for their Cialis page. The Alexa page gets crawled and begins to rank for [cialis] due to factors like the anchor text dropped in the guestbook spam. If a user clicks over to the Alexa page from the [cialis] SERP, it still requires another click to get to the pills-deals.com site, so I'm curious about the clickthrough on a #8 result that requires an additional click beyond clicking away from the SERP. Still, the rankings portion of the equation seems to be working.

Second case: Technorati
Here's a double slap in the face of Google. The crew at xlpharmacy.com (or maybe just an adoring fan) set up a fake Cialis blog -- on Google's own Blogspot.com domain, no less -- and used Technorati tags to tag each post the same way: "Buy Cialis Online. FDA Approved Quality Pills. cialisxl." So queries like [cialis] and [buy cialis online] show sites like the Technorati tag page in their top results, since Technorati tag pages are crawled and indexed by Google. Again, once the user clicks over, it requires another click to get to the actual pill sales site. And even if the user clicks over from the Technorati tag page to the fake blog (cialisbuyonline1.blogspot.com), the user never even sees the blog -- instead, falling prey to a JavaScript redirect to xlpharmacy.com.

Neither of these techniques is particularly new, which is part of the problem. Pharm SERPs seems to be as useless and irrelevant as they've always been, representing one of the biggest problems that engines' anti-spam teams face right now.