Black Hat Link Building Ethics Question
-
I have taken on the SEO/Inbound duties for my company and have been monitoring some of our competitors in the market space. In June one of them began a black hat link building campaign that took them from 154 linking root domains to about 7500 today.
All of the links target either /header or /permalink/index and all have anchor text along the lines of "Windows 7 activation code." They are using forgotten forums and odd pages, but seem to be finding high DA sources to place the links.
This has skyrocketed their DA (40 to 73), and raised their mozRank, mozTrust, and SERP positions.
Originally I thought to report it to Google, but I wanted to wait a few weeks and see what the campaign did for them and if Google would catch on. I figured adding 81K links in 2 months would trigger something (honestly, if I was able to find out they were doing it then it's got to be obvious). But they have grown every week and no drop in rankings.
So my question is would you report it? Or continue to wait and see?
Technically they are not a "competitor" in the strictest sense of the word (we actually do sell some of their products as OEM), but I find the tactic despicable and it makes my efforts to raise our rankings and DA seem ineffective to people not in the know about SEO.
Interested to see everyone's responses!
Taylor
-
Old post but for anyone that feels that waiting for Google to penalize someone will take too long or not work... here's an example of a major competitor of ours getting hit on the last:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/therichest.org
It took about a year and a bit. We even offered $XX,XXX to purchase their sites, and after discovering their techniques, just waited it out to see their huge decline.
-
I'm not sure it implies harm. If a competitor doesn't pay taxes, it doesn't directly harm my company, but it is wrong and it may give them a temporary (if extremely risky) competitive advantage.
I see the same situation here. The linkbuilding doesn't directly harm my company, but it does give them a temporary competitive advantage in a manner that Google has said is wrong. Manipulating the system is breaking the rules, which is ethically wrong. It doesn't matter that it happens all the time, it doesn't matter if a legitimate or illegitimate business is doing it.
Ultimately I wouldn't necessarily report a company that wasn't paying taxes to the IRS, nor in this case am I going to report the site's linkbuilding activities to Google. But in a purely ethical sense I should. I guess that was more the question.
-
"If you knew a business was doing something wrong offline, would you report it?"
Yes, but wrong implies doing harm to another person. If people are being harmed by visiting the site, or the business isn't legitimate, that's another case altogether. I'm not sure I'd agree that using these tactics is wrong when the business is legitimate.
I certainly don't have a problem with those who want to report artificial linkbuilding; I just choose not to spend my time policing linkbuilding practices.
-
Hi Carson,
I agree I have little to gain from reporting them from a business stance. It's actually fun to watch and predict when things hit the fan for them.
But to me reporting is about keeping things right. I don't really agree with Hall or Wall. Online should be no different than offline. If you knew a business was doing something wrong offline, would you report it? You wouldn't be able to justify allowing banks to continue to fix prices because some employees might fired if they got caught, so how could you justify allowing crappy SEO tactics to continue just because some people might get hurt. Egregious example, but the point remains. On a scale of 1 to 10, link spamming may be a 1 compared to the banks 10, but that doesn't mean its not wrong.
I certainly have sympathy for innocent people who get hurt by the consequences of other's actions, intended or unintended, but that is not enough (for me anyway) to say I don't care that the wrong thing is happening.
The faster a bad tactic is made invalid, the faster people might move toward better practices, which ultimately puts less people at risk.
I guess in the end, I'm uncomfortable saying "google will take care of it without me" because I want to be part of the solution.
-
Hello,
Do not fall to the trap of reporting your competitor, spend your time in being productive by focusing on your online brand building instead, find out what are people's concerns when looking for activation codes and create beautiful content that will make you differentiate in the market. Thats how you should be spending your time. Black hat SEO refers to money making sites. Its how much you spend VS how much you make till you get caught as most people said above. This is why most of the high PR links they have are rented and not permanent and they pay $100-$200 for them to be there. He can rank temporarily (yes temporarily, he will get hammered soon - SAPE links were finished last week and took all the web sites with them) but he will be gone/sandboxerd sooner or later while you will always be there. Sustaining your ranks and reputation will benefit your business much more than a rank one on google and if your boss cant see that, maybe he should join a quick marketing course
-
Like others said that Google will eventually caught them but I have seen in my personal experience that it take a long time to get the website turn down from the SERP rankings. I have seen 1<sup>st</sup> position for a website for few money making keywords and their link generation tactics are all black hat!
I guess Google look in to these areas after the penguin refresh and turn down the websites accordingly which seems to be a long time in my opinion! I guess Google should consider taking quick action in this regard!
Your request as a single source might not help much but yes if many people complain against the website tactics there is a strong chance that Google take action within less time! (just a practical thought ... no evidence about it!)
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Taylor,
As others have said, a site building so many links with aggressive anchor text is going to get caught and penalized eventually: probably on the next Penguin refresh, if not sooner. We see this a lot in some of the spammier SERPs where churn-and-burn tactics like this are still the norm. What often escapes notice is that a lot more SERPs used to be covered in spam - "insurance" was horrible, for example - but they are now filled with legitimate brands. Eventually (though not soon, at this rate) there will be little space left for these tactics as sites providing real value move in and solidify their positions.
As far as the morality goes, I suppose it depends upon your moral philosophy. Everyone has an opinion on reporting spam, but let me instead ask you some questions: What do you have to gain by reporting the competitor? Will a report make your business thrive? Does reporting them make the web better for users? Could the competitor learn about it, and turn a spam attack (that probably won't work) on you?
Personally, I'd ignore it and focus on my own business. I have almost nothing to gain by taking others down. In fact, I might be better off if they continue doing cheap tactics while I build a real business. I may eventually fill out a WMT report on them if I was second to them in dozens of SERPs. I wouldn't feel bad about it, either, if it made the web a better place. Here are some other opinions:
http://joehall.me/seo-outing-is-immoral/29/
http://www.seobook.com/media-literacy-seos-or-why-seo-outing-bad
Rand has a discussion about it here:
http://moz.com/blog/aaron-wall-and-i-debate-the-open-discussion-of-webspam
-
That's a good response Alex. Short term or long term game. Need to keep reminding ourselves of that.
-
Anything with "Windows 7 activation code" will eventually get hit by Google whether you decide to report it or not. It might take a day, week, month, year but Google will eventually find their links spammy and do something about it. That's really the gamble with black hat. How long will it take Google or someone to kill the project? The idea with blackhat though, is you burn the domain or burn whatever the project is once it's no longer profitable. If you plan on working on the same brand for a long time, whitehat is really the only way to go.
They'll see a short boost now, but once they get hit, it'll be a huge hassle to fix everything.
-
Can you post their url?
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
-
Nofollow for reciprocal links?
Hi, We have reciprocal links with our business partners. Their websites have been listed on our website with "nofollow" links and they link to our website with "nofollow" or "dofollow" links. Is this wrong having reciprocal links? And if they are our partners, "nofollow" or "dofollow" is better? I don't think there will be anymore link juice loss with dofollow links from our website?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Submitting url to link directories seen as un-natural link building?
Hi I have been a lurker for a long time, so I finally took the step to make my 1st post, and will hopefully start giving back more in the future since I have gained invaluable info from this great site Background I hired a new freelancer on our team of SEO consultants ("specialists") During the course a month he (the new consultant) submitted our website to numerous link directories (he assured me this is good), today I received the report of the work he had been doing for the past 4-weeks. I opened the report and I was furious and wanted to sack him there and then The Problem / My Question He had submitted our website to 150 directories with various levels of page rank, ranging from 7-1. Most of the directories are totally irrelevant to our niche (we are in the catering business) and he had gone and submitted the site to directories such as "finance busters", "questfinder" etc For all 150 submissions he used: exactly the same url exactly the same title exactly the same description exactly the same keywords My Concern Am I right to be worried about this? Or am I completely wrong and may this actually have an effect (even if none)? The way I see it is that Google is seeing 150 duplicate links coming from irrelevant directories all within a months time, which will trigger a red flag and possibly do major damage to my site, which has always been strictly white hat and been doing pretty well. p.s does link directory submissions even count these days anyway? Thanks for reading and advice very much welcome
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | timthetanker0 -
Bad links showing up in opensiteexplorer
Hello Everybody,I've been working as an inhouse SEO for nearly a year and a half now and i've gotten some pretty great results. Two years ago our site was on the second page for the most important keywords in our niche and with a lot of work we've managed to get top 5 rankings for most keywords and even the number 1 spot for the most important keywords. I've been using opensite explorer to track backlinks and today i noticed that a lot of links we're discovered in the last week from websites that i did not recognize. Most url's won't even load properly because each "blogpost" has over a thousand comments. It took me a couple of tries to even find one that loaded properly and find the link to our website, and it was really there. There haven't been any drops in our rankings but i'm worried about a possible spam penalty. I know that i can use the disavow tool to at least disavow the links from these domains, but is that really the only thing i can do? Furthermore these are just the links that opensiteexplorer picked up, who knows how many more are out there.For any of you questioning wether or not i did this to myself, I'm no saint, but I'm definitely not stupid enough to buy these kinds of links. any help would be highly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Laurensvda0 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Have I created link spam.....
Howdy fellow Mozzers.... Since Googles Penguin Update I am overly cautious when reviewing our link profile. I spotted 2 domains linking to us yesterday, 80+ links from each domain to our homepage. This looked superstitious, site wide links effectively. At first inspection I couldn't spot the links....they turned out to be two individual comments, but as the site had a plugin with "most recent comments", 1 link became 80. The link is an exact match of the individuals name who made the comment. And is a result of filling out the comment form. Name: Website: Comment: By filling out the name and website the name becomes the anchor text for the link to the website. Long story short...do you think this is penguin esq. link spam? Is it not? Or is it just not worth the risk and remove them anyway???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Being penalized for unnatural links, determining the issue, and fixing the problem. What to do?
Hi all, A client has been penalised, having received the message in Google Webmasters last week, along with two more yesterday. It seems the penalty is for something specific: “As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole“. This is the first time I've had to deal with this so I'll be a bit layman about it The penalty, firstly, seems to be for the old domain, from which there is a re-direct to the current one. This redirect has been in place since Feb 2012 (no link building has been done for the old domain since then). In Webmasters, I have the old and new domains set up separately and the messages are only coming for the old (but affecting the new, obviously). I need to determine if it’s the old or new URL I’m being hit for, or would that even matter? Some questionable links I can see in WM: There is an affiliate for whom WM is showing 154,000 links (all followed) from their individual products listings to the client’s site (as a related product) but they’re linking to the new domain if that matters. Could this affiliate be an issue? There is also Updowner, which has added 2000+ links unbeknownst to me but apparently they are discounted by Google. I see a ton of recent directory submissions - right up until last week - that I am not responsible for. Could that be intentional spam targeting? I did also use a 3<sup>rd</sup> party link building company for Feb, March and April who ‘manually’ submitted the new domain to directories and social bookmarking sites. Could this be issue? For what kind of time-scale are penalties usually imposed - how far back (or how recently) are they penalising for? Ranking were going really well until this happened last Thursday. Will directories with non-followed links effect us negatively - one such one has over 2000 links. What is the most conclusive way to determine which are the poor, penalty-incurring links pointing to us? I know I now have to contact all the dodgy directories the site is now listed on to get links removed, but any and all advice on how to rectify this, along with determining what had gone wrong, will be most appreciated. Cheers, David
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich0 -
What can i do with it? Black hat in my competitors.
Hi, Here we go, i have a site that is is in first page but in last positon, and i got a competitor that is in first place but his is just duplicate content for every page. He just chage the keyword but still the same content. Really, what can i do, do the same thing, i dont want black hat my site. Do i have to keepping doing my on-page and link building and do not care about him?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ex20