I learn something everyday here. I ran across this term today and naturally had to do some reading.

Reverse SEO? Does it mean trying to get listed lower in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)? Of course not! Reverse SEO is interpreted in a couple of ways though.

Some say - it’s about researching your competitor’s SEO efforts – analyzing their title tags, meta description, PR, links to their domain and links to a URL found via a search query for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Does their site have quality, relevant and compelling content? Is it updated regularly? Are they using social media? In short, what separates their sites from your site? This method of SEO emcompasses attempting to emulate success. I use this method daily to analyze what others are doing to rank high in the search engines.

Others believe - that reverse SEO means trying to do damage control. What happens when a search query returns results that are not advantageous to your firm or organization (or you)? Believe it or not, there are companies that will perform online damage control – by attempting to push those unfavorable results down to page 2, 3 or 4 where they won’t be so readily noticed. How? By posting a ton of positive reviews to counter anything negative.

Another take - on reverse SEO is to just not do any SEO. The angle here is to design sites for the users and not for the search engines. This sounds great in theory, but viewing patterns very clearly indicate that you need to be on page one, and the closer to number one, the better.

What's your take on reverse SEO?

sounds a little like reverse engineering software or deconstruction of software.

Sounds like fun to me actually

SEO fascinates me - white hat versus black hat, PageRank versus SERPS, what works and what doesn't work. What is Google REALLY looking at? And now reverse SEO - I wonder how what kind of revenue stream these damage control companies generate?

If we only knew...

yeah..

The best SEO is organic SEO. There are a lot of "tricks" out there that people use and spend a lot of money implementing (take backlinks from unique IPs, for example) that search engines like google have explicitly said doesn't help.

The hardest part about SEO is sifting through the BS and the facts and trying to figure out what actually works and what's just urban legend or gimmicks by SEO companies to get you to spend more.

I have been fortunate to have the ear of several SEO gurus from places like SEOMoz, ExactTagert, Alchemist Media, and a few others.

Reverse SEO (that is no doing any specific SEO) will likely get your good results if you meet certain criteria ...

Have great content
Have an authority domain
Update content regularly
Have a legacy link base

However, if you are starting out it is an uphill battle and active SEO techniques can get you to the front page.

For example, I wrote a tutorial article on using screen utility in linux a few years ago. The tutorial has pretty much become the de facto screen tutorial. There was little SEO done here. We tweaked the title once, but that is about it.

Great content will build over time and put you at #1.

There are other terms that we want to be #1 but have had to work extensively just to get to the front page. The area is highly competitive with industry giants (microsoft, google, ibm, intel, etc) competing in the space.

It is only through careful active SEO efforts that we landed on the front page.

Thats the fun part. To really do well with SEO, you need to have a measurable way to test your efforts. The best advise I've ever had was to ignore the SERPs and simply build traffic and good content on your site.

Can't ignore SERPs completely otherwise your links are so burred down in the listing that people will never click it

You can LIKELY reach high results without trying, but if you're trying to get more traffic, getting higher in the SERPS is your best bet.

Hi,

We are pulling down our unfavorable link to back. However, we don't know that we are doing reverse SEO and never heard this term before. Thanks for the valuable Information

Just did some research on ORM strategies - certainly, anything that damages a busineses' reputation and brand needs to be addressed.

At some times, there is almost nothing you can do about bad reviews on a well ranked site except hope for some positive reviews by your clients since you probably cant post reviews about yourself.

Posting reviews about yourself is pretty much prohibited by all web hosting forums. It's very easy to get flamed (with or without merit) and you have to be very professional in how it's handled.

its the most important thing, figuring out how your competition gets their sales from, how they do it, etc

thats the thing about the internet, you can figure this stuff out and start an empire from behind your computer, dont have to invest in brick and mortar