Hey there,
Some actual research that could help you guys out. First these EVE ISK companies are relying upon two methods to attack the EVE community and get customers.
Firstly letGÇÖs deal with PPC advertising on Google, I will only deal with Google as that will cover the vast majority of the issue (some similar work may be required with Bing to cover the problem in the US). Right now PPC is a massive problem as itGÇÖs an instant trip to the top of the SERPs with the majority of Google users not realising that people pay for these rankings and that it is no indication that Google actually trust these sites just purely based upon the fact that they paid to be there.
As EVE online ISK and other EVE assets are copyrighted then get in touch with Google and make a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request to Google complaining about the copyrighted materials appearing on these ISK selling websites. This will then either force the site into removing these assets or if they donGÇÖt then Google will delist them not only from the regular SERPs but also from PPC.
Secondly onto regular results in the SERPs and how these can be tackled. Well to put it simply these companies are scammy as hell and their whole online strategy is based around spammy link building something which is actually against Googles guidelines, so straight away report them:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1Then start your own site targeted towards the keyword table below, based around the effects of RMT on the EVE community and the risks of getting caught. You simply have to create better content than them and then plea to the EVE community to all write a blog post about RMT and buying ISK and link it to your site. If you ask people to use the anchor text for the exact keyword then great, if not donGÇÖt worry too much as Google have recently reduced the value of anchor text on links.
Site traffic for iskspot.com:
Query Percent of Search Traffic
buy isk 37.10%
eve online isk 21.49%
eve isk 13.41%
iskspot support 2.19%
buy eve isk 2.12%
iskspot safe 1.98%
damage dealing eve 1.29%
eve high-tech weapons 1.12%
eve security status 0.90%
eve weapons upgrades 5 0.78%
They have 2,820 back links of which 295 come from 255 websites with the anchor text GÇÿeve ISKGÇÖ and 254 come from 225 websites with the anchor text GÇÿbuy iskGÇÖ. This is something we can easily beat as a community especially with high PR links from the main EVE sites.
Finally one last recommendation is to make a youtube video optimised for the keywords buy isk, perhaps go for a title like GÇÿbuy ISKGǪ suffer the consequencesGÇÖ. This will then with a little bit of work appear in the SERPs too as Google love putting Youtube videos at the top of the SERPS effectively giving you double top positions and knocking everyone else actually selling ISK below the fold.
If you steal their traffic you kill their industry. If you require any advice or want any further information please feel free to contact me. I'm sure there are plenty more SEO'ers in the community that could offer you further advice too. Good luck killing RMT.
Regards,
Danny