What is indirect SEO? I will answer that in a bit. Perhaps, there is another technical term for what I am going to describe as an indirect SEO that I don't know. Anyway, what matters is knowing what the idea behind it is.
We all know people want to optimize their websites for some keywords so that they show up in the SERPs. One way to do this is to increase the page rank, at least in the past. Businesses spend a lot of money doing search engine optimization. With my limited knowledge and experience out of personal interest in this space, I can say, the task is not easy and never ending. Just when you take a breather that you have reached the next level of ranking, you would see Google updating it's page rank to find that your page rank may have tanked down by 2 points. Or may be went up from 0 to a 4! But those are very few lucky ones.
So, these companies that spend a lot of money optimizing their websites for some keywords, why would they all of a sudden want to also optimize the same keywords for some other site that they don't own? Does it sound like a stupid idea to paint the street when you are renovating your store? Well, it did to me at first and then later realized the reason. Now hold that thought for a moment.
I chanced up on a couple of postings on a free lance website (best way to find out what many people are doing on any given topic is to visit these websites filled with ideas, good or bad) where the buyer is ready to pay a lot of money to remove negative posts on the search engine results first pages. The ask is to push down all the negative publicity about their product or company as much down as possible.
Immediately I connected the dots. The idea is, there are some good websites that have very good page rank. For example, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn just to name a few. These websites are also such that they allow users to create content on their website. Now, what if someone whose company or product got some negative publicity goes ahead and creates a profile page on some of these popular social websites and start optimizing their keywords to these pages? Given that the main domain of these pages are very popular, chances are that they are likely to rank at the top than some negative pulicity on some forum.
Now, this technique is what I call as indirect SEO. Essentially, you not only optimize for those keywords for yourself to be on top of the search results, you also want to influence who else is present on the first (and may be second) page of the search results. This could be very expensive, but I guess, it might more than offset the losses due to the negative publicity.
So what's Google or any other search engine company going to do about this indirect SEO? Don't know, let's wait and watch. If you have any comments on this subject and want to discuss further about this topic, feel free to shoot me an email.