Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
-
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry.
They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors.
It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
-
Kevin, can you give us any type of update as to how this turned out? Did the rankings drop back after a bit, or are they still there? Did you figure out if they were using any shady tactics?
-
There are a lot of analysis you need to do to find out whether a person is doing BH on their site (just like NY Times hiring a SEO company to research on JC Penny) as there are a lot of plays you can play around with to try and trick Google.
Just some examples:
Onsite
- Are they stuffing keywords?
- Are they using doorway pages?
Offpage
- Are they buying links?(Most common)
- Are they spamming blog comments?
At the end of the day, if you find out that they are actually using BH method, you can report them from Google Webmaster Tools, make sure you put in all your evidence as they would not spend the time analyising each request.
-
Hi Kevin,
It is really hard to assume that a website is using BH unless I am able to check them myself, but for starters (which I believe you already did) you can always check the FF: PR, Links (inbound & outbound) use yahoo for this, use the tools in SEOmoz for this too to determine the quality of links.
You see it could also mean that those websites are of diff. IP's and each site is linking to authority domains, needless to say but you also have to check your website if it is really optimized and the duration thereof for its caching.
Now this is a handful but I am excited as to the outcome of this.
Cheers!
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
-
Does Google and Other Search Engine crawl meta tags if we call it using react .js ?
We have a site which is having only one url and all other pages are its components. not different pages. Whichever pages we click it will open show that with react .js . Meta title and meta description also will change accordingly. Will it be good or bad for SEO for using this "react .js" ? Website: http://www.mantistechnologies.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA0 -
Opinion on Gotch SEO methods & services
I would love to get you all's take on Gotch SEO. I am gearing up to link build for a site in the next several months, and have been reading up from sources other than Moz, in preparation. (Need to re-read Moz's guide, too, but I have already read it last year) I'm reading Gotch SEO's main link building method articles right now, and am wondering what you all think. Do you think they have a good approach and are generally reliable? Likewise, has anyone used their service for getting a link? What was your experience? Or if you haven't used the service, any quick takes on it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scienceisrad0 -
Client Wants To Use A .io Domain Name - How Bad For Organic?
Hi, I have a U.S. client who is stuck on a name that he wants to get as a .io (British Indian Ocean) domain name for a new site. Aside from the user confusion/weirdness, how much harder do you think this makes this sites organic in the U.S. in the future with a .io domain name? FYI, the other part of the domain name he wants to use is short, meaningless and implies nothing in and of itself. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945012 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Best Location to find High Page Authority/ Domain Authority Expired Domains?
Hi, I've been looking online for the best locations to purchase expired domains with existing Page Authority/ Domain Authority attached to them. So far I've found: http://www.expireddomains.net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VelasquezEF
http://www.domainauthoritylinks.com
http://moonsy.com/expired_domains/ These site's are great but I'm wondering if I'm potentially missing other locations? Any other recommendations? Thanks.1 -
Can I 301 redirect old URLs to staging URLs (ex. staging.newdomain.com) for testing?
I will temporarily remove a few pages from my old website and redirect them to a new domain but in staging domain. Once the redirection is successful, I will remove the redirection rules in my .htaccess and get the removed pages back to live. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Negative SEO - Case Studies Prove Results. De-rank your competitors
Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dean19860 -
Can you block backlinks from another domain
Wondering if this is somehow possible. A site got hacked and created a /data folder with hundreds of .php files that are web pages selling all sorts of stuff. We deleted the /data folder and blocked Google from indexing it. Just noticed in Webmaster Tools that the site has 35,000 backlinks from other sites that got hacked with the same way. Is there a way to block these sites? I am assuming there isn't, but wanted to see if anyone ran into the same problem. It is a wordpress site is that helps.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phatride0