I am noticing a growing trend, some webmasters are becoming more clever and are now ranking by proxy.  Basically, this means instead of promoting their own website for keywords, they simply will promote a user-generated web page from a already popular website which pages easily gain ranking in Google.  These web pages will contain links to the webmaster website. 

An example is posting a new topic on let’s say Digital Point Forums (a popular SEO discussion board) which discusses and advertises your new service, so you provide a press release story with links to your website.  Now, it is natural for this Digital Point page to gain some ranking because the site domain has a good report with the search engines, but Ranking by Proxy is the act of actually marketing and providing SEO efforts for that particular Digital Point page — getting it to rank for competitive keywords in the search engines, but the page is about a new service your company is offering with direct links to your website, so in essence you are getting your website to rank by proxy.

In many cases it is easier to get a “popular” website web pages to rank and usually in shorter time.  Since the website is already a trusted website within Google it is simpler to increase the ranking and make the page favored by the search engines.  This method of operations currently works.  It does a lot less for your website organic ranking and SEO even though some benefit exist, but it is most helpful for getting traffic to your website from competitive keywords.  Also, I can see a benefit for websites which have been sandboxed and aren’t currently ranking for any favorable keywords.

I wonder how long will it be before Google catches on and try to stop these type of proxy rankings.   And if they do try, then how will they be able to determine the true nature of a “trusted” website page ranking?  How can they detect and stop this type of behavior?  It may be an impossibility.

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