Questionable backlinks...
-
One of our competitors (who are ranking top spot ) have this trend of building backlinks from websites build for the sole purpose of seo. (see example) When you see the website it's just a submission of articles from different companies trying to rank for a certain keyword most of the time poorly written.
Our competitor seems to be doing this a lot...
What do you guys think, is it just a matter of time before Google cracks down on them or is this technique actually working for them? (even though it's rather grey hat) Or... could it be someone trying to build "poor" backlinks to them in an attempt to push them of the Google throne -
I agree the strategy is ill-conceived. Either it was executed by an incompetent company, or one that is into "churn and burn" tactics. By the time Google catches on, it will have moved on to the next client.
-
I'm not to worried about the timing of the penalty just rather curious about their strategy and even after all Google's attempts to stamp out this style of SEO it looks like many are still practising it. I think it's interesting to see that sometimes these methods can still deliver results although they are probably juggling a ticking time bomb
-
I realise the links might be disavowed but they are very fresh so it looks like recent work. I also think the SEO company put their own details on the first link i supplied... maybe their client doesn't even know this is going on
-
Just a little note to add to the other comments...
Doing backlink analysis on competitors is very tricky nowadays thanks to the disavow tool. For all you know, your competitor has disavowed these links and Google is no longer counting them which would explain why they are still ranking so well.
The example website you supplied is undoubtedly paid for posts and as they are not no-followed, the website is not going to be passing any benefits to those linking from the website.
-
You can gather a list of domains and backlinks to this site that you think are spam and influencing this site's rankings unnaturally and then submit a spam report. This can help to speed up the process.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1
-
You could do a whois lookup for clues that the sites are run by the same SEO company (or at least people trying to cover their tracks.) But what's the point?
As a former editor, I can tell just be reading the articles that they were likely written by the same semi-literate person. I'd even speculate the author is not a native English speaker. That said, it's clear the articles were written by a human in some semblance of English.
So it may take Google longer to spot that articles that it would for spun or computer-generated articles. That said, there are big problems with articles. These include low word counts on very thin sites. The Google algo is good at catching this -- eventually.
I'm guessing you're in the same situation I was. A competitor hired a sleazy SEO company. The SEO company used three techniques:
- links from article directories
- links from once-legit sites it had acquired and corrupted
- links from sites it had created itself
In all, there were more than 100 links from crappy articles. Eventually all but 3 were devalued. But it took almost a year.
As I said below, there is not much you can do beyond focussing on what you can control: your own SEO efforts.
You could submit a spam report to Google. But short of criminal misconduct (my rival hacked my site and here is the police report) Google will almost certainly not take individual, manual action against your competitor. It generally looks for abusive patterns and rolls the information into algo updates.
I understand your frustration. But my tough lough advice is:
Stop fretting about what your rival is doing and get down to work on your site.
-
Thanks for your thoughts on this guys, much appreciated! Here are some other websites used example 1 example 2 example 3 example 4 and there is more...
What are the chances of these websites al being run by the same seo company ?
Some of the articles are so bad i can't believe this stuff is still getting results!
It also looks like majority of the articles are pretty recent or do they just keep changing the dates?And is there a way to make Google catch on to these sites sooner?
-
I agree with the above: it's almost certainly just a matter of time before the smackdown comes.
The wait can be frustrating, though.
Been there, done that, waited it out -- and it took almost a year.
In the meantime, just focus on the nuts and bolts of on-page, while building quality content and backlinks.
What else can you do?
If it's any consultation, the smackdown can be huge and sudden. When it finally comes.
-
Hi Immanuel,
While I can't comment on the site in question and their backlink profile because you haIt ven't shared it, what I can tell you is a bit more information about weekendpost, the site you did share as one of the sites in this company's backlink profile. Looking at a random site with articles built for link building purposes, it is pretty rare that you find a site like this with a PR of 5 in this day and age. Many of these were smacked by Google in the various updates and penalties, with public PR often reduced as a public indication of this site's devaluation. However, the site you shared has a toolbar PR of 5 and a homepage authority of 57, clearly a stronger site than your usual hastily built article spam site.
Looking closer into the history of the site using the Wayback Machine, you can see that this site was once an actual legitimate site and source of weekend news. It started accruing links in 2011, and this is where much of the site's strength comes from. At some point the domain was likely dropped and picked up and converted to an article site for links. Whois further signifies that there was a change in registration of the site with 1 drop.
Do I think Google will eventually catch up with this site and devalue its links if they haven't already? Certainly. But in the short term, links from this site may be boosting up other sites. I don't think this is a good long term solution, but I can see the benefit from links from a strong site (according to metrics at least) like this in the short term.
Mark
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
-
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BBT-Digital0 -
Question regarding Aggregate Rating
We have a directory site with multiple listings. Currently, our page structure is fragmented for each of the tabs (about, products, reviews, etc) with canonicals going back to the main listing page. This includes the reviews as well. Review aggregate is marked up and the stars are rendering in the SERPs. We are planning to break out reviews to /reviews and including a paginated series, then all of the tabs (about, products, NOT reviews) will be javascript loading content so no more fragmented URLs. Right now, I suspect that the stars are rendering on the main listing page because the review page that is currently fragmented has a canonical back to the main listing page. The main listing page also is marked up with the review aggregate. if we break out /reviews, all of the reviews will live on /reviews. If we break out /reviews to it's own URL, will we have to have a small amount of reviews on the main listing page to have the stars render in the SERPs for the main listing page?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
Bad backlinks is it possible that Google is penalizing me?
Hi guys, since December I'm receiving thousands of bad backlinks from websites that copy my content and content from other websites. I also noticed a drop in the organic visits each month. Is it possible that Google is penalizing me for those backlinks? I know that I can ask the webmaster to remove the links but I don't believe that they will do. Look like it's a robot that does all this automatically. Should I use the Google disavow tool? Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
Check images below please.
Thanks! OjAFwgT mni5lke UPVp9bW0 -
Spamming Backlinks - doesn't seem to be detrimental enough?
Hi, We have noticed sites such as http://www.rattanfurnitureoutlet.co.uk & http://www.supremerattanfurniture.co.uk/ have huge numbers of what appear to be spam like and invaluable backlinks yet they have both maintained a great ranking for their search terms despite this. We would like to know why, does the good outweigh the bad so to speak?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | birdmarketing0 -
Ever seen this tactic when trying to get rid of bad backlinks?
I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre. Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com. One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/... So when I visit http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on. And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com. So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Patrick_G0 -
Real Vs. Virtual Directory Question
Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc. My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately. Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it? Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
Is this traffic drop do to cutting backlinks or Penguin 2.0 (Graphs attached)
I've attached both graphs of the traffic drop. Our website rankings have been steadily declining since May of 2013. We have mostly return customers or our drop would have been much more severe. There's never been any warnings in GWT We cut a bunch (but not all) of our paid links in May of 2013. We didn't have a manual penalty or anything, we just wanted to see what happened if we moved towards being white hat. When our rankings plumited, we quit cutting links. We currently have about 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was May 22, 2013 In looking at these graphs, was it our cutting links that caused the traffic drop, or was it Penguin 2.0? I'm looking for people who have experience in diagnosing a "Unique Visits" Google analytics graph for Penguin and have experience with what happens when you cut links. It looks like, in viewing the graphs, that May 23 was more the day that the big drop happened, but you guys have more experience with this than me. Thank you. ga.png ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Question #1 - My Cherry's Popped!
I recently acquired rights to a URL that is one of our keywords. Instead of developing a landing page with that URL and then only linking it back to the company root, I was thinking about adding a link within the company's global nav that pushes to this new URL (and new page content of course). Are there any Pros or Cons to doing it that way? Thank you so much!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GladdySEO0