March 26th, 2010 by Susie

Astroturfing is one of those slang shortcuts that’s found its way into technical literature. It is the ‘art’ of appearing neutral and balanced while actually pushing a particular product, website, or brand- or political party, for instance. Usually the term is used to describe websites stuffed with fake reviews and trying to pretend they aren’t maintained by a company with a strong vested interest. You can guess how it works. Imagine you have a product that isn’t moving as well as you’d hoped. Maybe it’s got some bad reviews and your internet reputation management just can’t get off the ground because there are too many people who don’t like it. Maybe the problem is simply that nobody is all that interested.

It might be very tempting to start a website to sing the praises of that particular item. Because that site is yours, you can put as many good reviews up as you want and remove any negative comments that pop up. And while you’re there, you may as well use it to promote your other goods, right? Before you know it, you’re astroturfing and well into unethical SEO territory.

The practice of astroturfing also includes off page action like leaving comments on industry hubs pretending to be a satisfied customer rather than stating your interests and allegiances up front. That may work once or twice, but any decent hub is going to be monitoring the comments coming in from each IP address for spam like this.

But wait a minute. The fundamental problem here is that people don’t like the product. If it was any good, the attempt at SMM wouldn’t have been squashed by bad reviews and negative user comments. The best advice any marketing professional will give you in that situation is to get rid of that product or change it, not market it harder.

Like all unethical search engine optimization, astroturfing carries risks. Site users often see straight through it, particularly if their less than enthusiastic comment gets taken down. If the almighty and near omniscient Google finds out your company is using black hat SEO techniques to get ahead, be ready to be penalised and quite possibly banned from their rankings. What that amounts to is effectively SEO death. Who owns what on the web is publicly available knowledge (check out our Whois tool), so your main site will be dragged down too.

And of course, here’s the real question: why would you bother? If you create your own astroturfed site or hire space or links from someone else’s, that site won’t have any authority or any traffic. You could build it up through search engine optimization, but if you have the resources to do that it would be crazy not to use them for your honest site. Rather than acting the role of happy customer on forums, get people interacting with you as a representative of your brand. Set up inbound links from your message signature.  Ethical techniques and link building strategies are more effective and make more sense.

Astroturfing is one of those SEO techniques that look good at first glance, like buying a lot of incoming links. But it, like most black hat trickery, really won’t help you much and may do you serious harm.

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