RBS using dangerous SEO techniques?

[lauriebred]

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A new site has arrived, high in the Google serps for lots of search terms, i-directline.com. Owned by RBS It seems to be an identical copy of directline.com, from which it derives fake page rank.

Do the people responsible for this have any idea just how dangerous this old spamming technique is? Most of us abandoned it a decade ago when we found out how the search engines responded to it.

[Stephen-RBSInsurance]

Do the people responsible for this have any idea just how dangerous this old spamming technique is?

Hi - I'm the new SEO and Affiliates Manager at RBS Insurance.

We have a few technical challenges with some of our domains and because of these issues Google occasionally picks up alternative domains and subdomains on some of our sites and displays these instead of our preferred ones. The example you've pointed out isn't a new domain - we've owned it for nearly 10 years and it's used quite a bit for email activity.

We're not trying to do anything dangerous and we're definitely not spamming! The situation is far from ideal though - to the search engines this is duplicate content and so we're working to get this fixed as soon as we can.

[lauriebred]

Hi - I'm the new SEO and Affiliates Manager at RBS Insurance.

We're not trying to do anything dangerous and we're definitely not spamming! The situation is far from ideal though - to the search engines this is duplicate content and so we're working to get this fixed as soon as we can.

Dare I suggest some unique content on every page of these sites? Or a <noindex> attribute? Forgive me if I sound as though I'm trying to tech granny to suck eggs, I'm sure you have a complex situation there.

[Stephen-RBSInsurance]

Dare I suggest some unique content, ASAP? Forgive me if I sound as though I'm trying to tech granny to suck eggs, I'm sure you have a complex situation there.

It's a bit of a challenge, yes. But we know what we need to do about it - so it's onwards and (hopefully) upwards!

[lauriebred]

It's a bit of a challenge, yes. But we know what we need to do about it - so it's onwards and (hopefully) upwards!

Good luck Stephen, I'm relying on you to bring some value back to my RBS shares!:

By the way I'll expect a lager if we ever meet for pointing out the potential problem (a lager's probably worth more than my shares now) .

[Brendon]

>> It's a bit of a challenge, yes
Blimey, you aren't kidding, are you? Some dodgy linkbuying, about a bajillion sites on the same IP etc Quality stuff