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Weird SEO tactic I saw today… Any others seen/have experience with this?
Posted by on December 6, 2025 at 1:16 amI’ll try to explain this as clear as possible…
A client emailed today saying that they found a listing of their own insurance agency in the SERPs. But, the page they found was on the website of a different insurance agency who essentially made a “directory” on their site and listed a bunch of other insurance agencies with info about them (even though they have no connection with them).
How I interpreted this was that the other insurance agency was basically trying to rank for different agencies (such as my client) in order to steal traffic from them and maybe convert someone who landed on their site even if they were originally looking for the other agency.
Frankly, I just haven’t seen that before. Ironically this also results in a backlink to the agencies they listed, but I’m mainly just curious if this is like a black hat tactic I haven’t come across.
Anyone else see this before? If so, did you do anything?
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1 Reply
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Yeah I’ve seen it before, it has little or no value as the page might be bottom of page one for the exact match keyword at best. Normally the page redirects to their home page as well so it doesn’t even mention the competitor on the click. It’s really low level stuff that isn’t going to convert. If I look for Brand A and I click and it’s Brand Z I’m going to pogo stick right out of there
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Yes I have. A dentist of mine is inside a specific shopping center. let’s call it Thames – as example, not a real place. He called his office Dentist in Thames because the shopping center is called Thames and is near the river Thames. Another nearby dentist is using the fact to rank #1 when people search for Dentist Thames. Even though its not the thing people want.
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Well, what makes this tactic odd is it’s a competing agency. The way it’s suppose to be done is simply run separate directory website that appears neutral and third party. Get what I mean….
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They might be leveraging their stronger authority to channel traffic from competitors with zero authority to their website.
Bold move. Ballsey.
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This tactic is sounds a LOT like a “doorway page” – a page with no value designed to get traffic to redirect elsewhere- which Google is particularly sensitive to
It might work today, but it won’t last.
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Very 2000-ish. Not sure if it still works
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This happens a lot in SaaS. Email companies, for example crewt comparisons about the “best newsletter app”, pitting themselves at the top and the most obvious choose while their competitors are listed as options, although, obviously, not as good of an option.
This gets them ranked for that specific keyword and hopefully the majority of visitors see their app as the obvious choice.
Risky, but it could pay off, especially if you retarget visitors with a Meta pixel.
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