My competition is using 1px images and links without anchor text. Good or bad idea?
-
I've been scoping out some of my competition and I noticed the number 1 ranking site is doing a lot of "interesting" stuff. I saw a bunch of 1px blank images that they must be using for the alt tag keywords. I also noticed several links to internal pages with different keywords without anchor text so they don't actually appear on the page. Is this considered black hat? Should I be doing something similar? It feels like the work I'm doing to try to rank #1 with a clean/professional looking site are wasted when the #1 sites are doing things like this.
-
What is the best method to report spam to Google and Bing?
-
Good on you, some guy the other day on bing forum, wasted an hour of my time trying to work out why he could not get in bing serps, then i noticed over 1,000 keywords in the noframes tag, I was very pissed off, he must of know what his problem was, so i took an extra 5 minutes to report him.
-
Absolutely. I don't mind losing out to hard work but when I'm going up against cheaters I have no problem blowing the whistle. Google was easy and has a Chrome extension as well. Bing, I had to search for a link to email support and I had to provide my name/email which I think is annoying and probably deters people...but I did it anyway.
-
Did you report to Bing and Google?
Many complain but few actualy bother to report spam
-
Sounds good. I figured I shouldn't do the same but wanted to confirm. I didn't realize how easy it was to report spam so that's done. Thanks.
-
I would not use 1x1 pixels to give links or anchor text. That could get you in trouble with search engines for trying to hide something.
I honestly doubt that this is helping your competitor and is certainly more risky than helpful.
Just stay the course on improving your site. You will beat them when Google thinks you deserve it... or when Google drops them for trying to hide links.
-
You should not do the same, but report the spam to both google and bing.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Link juice from links that are not on the page?
Hello, Thank you in advance for your help! I was doing research for backlinking opportunities by looking at competitor backlinks using Open Site Explorer and I ran into a puzzle. When I do an Open Site Explorer search for http://whatsdavedoing.com/ I find that link equity is being passed to the site from a number of pages on the http://www.travelsupermarket.com/ blog with the anchor text "What's Dave Doing" When I go to these pages and do a source code search I cannot find this anchor text. When I do a google search with the following: site:travelsupermarket.com "What's Dave Doing" I find that there are tons of items that come back with a list of blogs in their description: "Dec 5, 2013 - ... foXnoMad · Inside The Travel Lab · itravelnet · The Mad Traveler Blog · The Mad Traveler Online · Uncornered Market · What's Dave Doing?" Where is this coming from? What is going on here? Is this a linking tactic that sites use to pass link juice to contributors without linking to them directly? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!
Competitive Research | | overlandundersea0 -
Competitive metrics
Hello everyone. Looking at the competitive metrics section and I realize, I know nothing about this. Is there a tutorial to explain these? I noticed that my Domain Authority has dropped in the past week. Curious of why and exactly what this means?
Competitive Research | | Jasonalanmagic0 -
Ad url compare link metrix
Hi, I want to add another url to compare link metric, but it does not work. I still see the waiting signal for about 4 hours now. is there something wrong with it?
Competitive Research | | JoostBruining0 -
One client - 2 domains / same business - good or bad idea?
This is a follow up to a previous question actually: My client has one domain that has 'hardwood flooring' in it and one that has 'concrete polishing' in it - both services they offer. **Would it be wise (for seo purposes) to have them both point to ONE domain (more general of course) ** **- They only have a few local competitors that aren't doing anything to rank well. ** **- They aren't trying to rank nationally. ** If the smart thing to do is to have them point to one (more general) domain using a 301 direct will there traffic drop significantly? (at least for a short time) Does it matter if they continue to keep the existing domains they are using now on their literature, business cards, etc. and let them continue pointing to the new domain or should they really start promoting the new domain name? (They do NOT want to do this). My only concern is saving them time and money by not having to build links, submit articles, social media, on and on for two different sites OK, that's like 3 questions Thank you VERY much for any thoughts or opinions on the matter! 🙂 Have a great week everybody! Matthew
Competitive Research | | Mrupp440 -
Use abbreviations for domains?
hi, can i use abbreviations for domain, if i want to purchase a long keyword domain like 29 characters? abbreviations are good for SEO or GOOGLE appreciate it or not? and use that keyword in description of the site or title of the site need your help..
Competitive Research | | parallelseo0 -
Use - or not for domain names
Hi there what is the best type of domain name if i have a keyword im targetting. Lets use 'very cool' as an example: www.verycool.com www.verycool.co.uk www.very-cool.com www.very-cool.co.uk I am led to believe the .co.uk would be better in a UK index. I also got told - count as a space, therefore the best one above for Google UK is www.very-cool.co.uk ?
Competitive Research | | pauledwards0 -
50,000 Links From The Same Website
Hey Mozers, I was conducting competitive research for a client of mine and I discovered one of their competitors has over 50,000 backlinks! After removing my heart from my stomach I realized that 99.9% of the links came from a single website that doesn't have nearly that many pages. Has anyone experienced this in the past? And if so what exactly is going on? C
Competitive Research | | calindaniel0 -
In Open Site Explorer, what does it mean when a linking page does not contain any reference to the URl entered?
When running Open Site Explorer on a particular URL, I get a list of linking pages. Many of these pages have a high Page Authority. I am assuming that this is a list of pages that presumably link to the URL I entered. First, is this correct? Next, when I click on an entry in the list I don't see any reference to the URL on the page, even viewing the page source. What does this mean and why is the link in the list?
Competitive Research | | jkenyon1