By the title of this post we dont mean the seocontest2008 thing we are messing about with at the moment, but we mean the competition we face in the SEO arena from other SEO Companies operating in our marketplace.We are now approaching full dominance (for the moment anyway) in almost all of our localised business target terms, except one. See SEO Demonstration for the list.

In this particular phrase however, we are amused on an almost daily basis lately by the antics of one of our competitors who despite being an extremely good web design company with a string of great client websites out there, and an excellent link profile inbound from those websites giving them a PR5 main domain, are up to all sorts of funny antics.

Most would likely not see this, but as we work across .com, .co.uk and .es we see a lot of different search results, and this company seem to have an identical domain for each engine and geographical location.

With the resources they obviously have at their disposal, they should really be able to wipe the floor with us across the board, so quite why they feel the need to have about 6 or 7 identical style homepages on different domains randomly and unpredictably cropping up in different searches is beyond us.

These floater domains are all identical to a casual user, with the companies logo in the middle of the page linking into their main PR5 site. What is strange about them though is that if you scroll down you come across a load of normally “hidden” text below the browser line that looks as though someone just copied and pasted a load of unformatted text on the bottom of the page and forgot about it. I mean really, it looks absolute rubbish.

Now we understand what theyre doing, basically they’ve bought a load of different domains, some with keywords, some not, and are testing different onsite SEO strategies, because on closer inspection the text on each is just slightly different, but all looks like it’s been written using the Adwords keyword tool, definitely not for users. Google guidelines breach No1.

The point is that as no effort has been made to make the text look reasonable to a viewer, one really has to assume that they aren’t intending to have the viewer see it? ..a reasonable assumption? Google guideline breach No 2.

So, an SEO Company, with six (or more) identical spammy domains with user-hidden content floating about (Google Guidelines breach No 3) - all of which link straight back to the main site?

This is SEO from 5 years ago lads, this is not creating the best site for the user you can, using content. The accessibility aproach may stand up if this was one domain, but as its 6 or more?

One would think it hardly engenders much confidence to their clients that they wouldn’t spam on their behalf in an attempt to get results, thereby risking clients site and business, as you they blatently do it with their own? Obviously their clients wouldnt know this because they dont spend all their time seeing it as we do. ..Come on lads you can do better than that.

The funny thing is that as a 15 week old start up site, with a PRzero, frankly we should have had no chance against a years old established PR5 SEO companies site, if it were built correctly with SEO and content always written for users in mind, as ours was.

So to be totally dominant in all but one of our target searches leaving them to flounder in the land of random domain names and hidden text trying to compete is a source of almost constant amusement.

The ironic thing is that in Ibiza the standard customer profile does even not know what search engine optimisation is to search for it until it is explained to them, and as with everything in Ibiza, it’s all word of mouth, and being here actually chatting to people.

“You have to be in it to win it..”

We are expanding very quickly and picking up clients on a daily basis at the moment, through word of mouth and customer referrals, when 2 weeks in when they see their own sites leaping into action they tell all their friends.

Our website is a long term project, and we have very much larger intended scope for it than just search engine optimisation in ibiza

We were never really expecting to be able to establish local presence quite so quickly, but rather it has come because of the way we’re looking at the bigger picture which is something our friends cant really be accused of.

Possibly another case of SEO by Web Designers in Ibiza ? who knows..