Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
-
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you?We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd.
So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab.
There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings)Their links are made up of:
- Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links
- Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc)
- Profile page links
- Low quality Press Release sites
- Classified ad sites
- Bookmarking sites
- Article Marketing sites
Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include:
- t-shirts
- sports news
- online marketing
- anti aging
- law
- christian guitars
- computers
- juke boxes
Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places.
So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them.
As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them!
So what steps would you take next?
-
Just an update.
Our site eventually returned to the 1st position for our main keyword.
The competitors site seems to have levelled out in position 9
There are other long tail terms we'd like to rank for that these are still dominating which I think is still a little crazy based on their link profile. I'd have expected them to have been hit a lot harder by Google?Thanks to all who contributed to this post so far, I will continue to watch and update this post should things change drastically.
-
Hi Adam,
I am really lucky and thankful that I am the owner here and don't have a board of directors.
If I was an employee and had a board of directors, I would tell them to imagine that we are driving on the highway and this guy is speeding. I would then tell them what might happen if we start speeding too... we could get a fine, we might have an accident, we might get there two minutes sooner.
If we speed with our domain we might get a ban, that would drop our revenue by $XXX,XXX per month, no traffic from Google, we could be down with that penalty indefinitely, if we speed, get above this guy for a couple of keywords that might increase our revenue by $xx,xxx per month.
So, based upon that analysis, I would not do anything about it. I would keep working on our website to make it better. THAT IS HOW I WOULD INCREASE OUR REVENUE. You will always be passed by occasional speeders, I don't think that we should chase every one of them. STAY FOCUSED ON OUR MISSION.
Then I would ask the board of directors, "What do you think we should do about it? Just let me know."
Getting philosophical here... If I had a board of directors who, in a situation like this, pointed at me like I am a kid in a school yard and saying "what are you going to do about it?"... I would have to respond by educating them first. If they responded well to education then I would be satisfied. But, if they persisted in the "what are you going to do about it" attitude then I would realize that I am working in a situation that does not suit me well.
-
Hi Egol, I understand why you responded with this.
However what if you have a board of directors asking you, why you have been over taken, what you're going to do about it and how long will it take?P.S. mine has been that they shouldn't be there for too long as they have used poor seo practice that Google "should" penalise them for. But I have to be honest, I am concerned that if they are still there in 3-6 months time, I'll look stupid.
-
Hey Adam,
This is not a surprising story. I am evident of such hundreds of cases. Have a look at case study where a company using same tactics ranking spot 2 for "SEO Services" in Google Australia: updatedseo.info/what-a-shame-penguin-2/
Still I strongly believe
- Your competitor is not going to stick for long. He will be washed out in next update which I am sensing very shortly
But I get surprised sometimes
- It is easy to build such links and get ranked for 2 or 3 months. Get hit and build another website and get ranked for next few months as well. Is it not hurting to companies that are doing right things from years and get outranked by such websites?
-
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you?
I pay zero attention to it. I keep working on my site.
-
My feeling is to wait them out if you can, and let the algorithm do its thing. If the competition's link profile is the way you describe it, then how long will the site last at the top of rankings? Not long, I would think. Time and time again, we see ranking spikes from low-quality links followed by monumental crashes. I even remember reading a study about this -- how algorithmic penalties are often preceded by impressive spikes in rankings.
In spite of the fact that we know these legacy forms of link building are dead, people are still doing them with gusto -- particularly offshore SEO practitioners, who are happy to make short-term money on short-term results. My guess is that your competitor knows little about SEO, read something about how important it is to have lots of links, and went out and hired the absolute cheapest SEO'er they could find, without having a clue about the business. I would imagine he has a big smile on his face right now, and he's telling people, "it's so easy to rank #1 on Google! All you have to do is pay someone a little bit of money to build a lot of links!"
I'm highly doubtful, however, that he'll remain in that spot.
-
I would wait, whilst sites like that may shoot up the the top of Google they tend to shoot down just as quickly. If you are really flustered you can report them to Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en
Make sure you are doing it all right (white hat) and you will out last them.
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
-
Weird Links Should I Disavow?
I have noticed some weird backlinks in Google Search console and Referals for Google Analytics. For example a reddit page I have never commented on or been on has referred over 900 visitors. The page has no relevance to my site whatsoever, when I check the source code I cannot see the link, so perhaps its been removed. Also seeing links in Google Search Console from sites that are just domain name for sale type pages, and sites/pages that don't seem to exist anymore, or which redirect to others. All of these links have disappeared as well, nothing in source code . And numerous pages that used to link to 404's on my site, many domain name for sale type pages, another which makes my bitdefender plugin go crazy. And seeing common referral patterns in Google Analytics, i.e. numerous /try.php pages on different domains that presumably used to link back but which now redirect to another site. I cannot say there are thousands of these, but I guess they are causing more harm than good. My instinct is to I go through all the links I can and disavow, the link types described above, but am I safe to do so? And is it a good idea or a waste of my time? NB: I haven't built any of them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GrouchyKids1 -
Domain authority - Low quality links
I have a question I hope people can help me on. it is my intention for my next project to focus on domain authority, and a small number of high quality links. I have a couple of scenarios I would appreciate some advice on: 1. Can lower quality links lower domain authority? 2. Would you avoid links from low quality sites no matter what \ what domain authority levels should you avoid links from. 3. Should I be looking at link profiles of the sites I get links from. Does it matter if a site I get a link from has 1000's of spammy links (i.e. something to look out for when doing guest blogging). 4. Should I avoid directories no matter what, or is high pr \ domain authority directories ok to use, if I end up on a page of other relevant directory submissions related to my niche. Essentially, my aim is to have high quality links, but equally, there are some decent sites on the fringes that I will need to consider (based on a competitors link profile I researches).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan19790 -
Can I report competitor for asking to guest post?
I just had an email from one of my least preferred competitor's SEO company asking about guest posting. They are already totally dominating the SERPs where they have no natural reason for being. Is there anywhere to bring this to the attention of the search engines?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cornwall0 -
Video & Image Spam?
We have 50 product videos and 100 product images to distribute. For the sake of increasing nofollow Linking Root Domains, my manager wants to distribute them in the following manner: 10 Company profiles on 10 video sites, each with 5 videos. The sites to be used are sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc. 10 Company profiles on 10 image sites, each with 10 images. The sites to be used are sites like Photobucket, Flickr, imageshack, Imgur, etc. My thoughts are that we should stick to one service for video (YouTube) and one service for images (Flickr). We can increase nofollow LRD's by doing some quality blog commenting. Keep in mind that the product images look great, but the videos are amateur and consist of someone holding the product and discussing it's features. Each vid is around one minute in length. What do you think of the two approaches and which do you prefer? Do you think creating many profiles will come off too spammy? We are also weathering a Panda penalty and submitting a Reinclusion Request to Google within the next two weeks. Your thoughts are very welcomed and appreciated. Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!
Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Townpages0 -
Link Building: High Ranking Site vs. Relevancy
Hello, When link building, is it acceptable to link with a site that has high authority but has minimal relevancy to our site? For example, if we sell nutritional products and the link exchange would be with a site that relates to free coupons, would that work? Also, if we are publishing articles on other sites, should we also publish them on our own site? Should we add "nofollow" if we publish them in our site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | odegi0 -
Auto-link inside your own site to the same domain is white-hat?
Hi, I am using a plugin in wordpress that make auto link for some certain keywords in my site suppose: My site is example.com My important keyword is: sample and across the domain example.com through out the content if there is the word: sample it is linked automatically to example.com I like your opinion about this practice, if it may carry any kind of punishment by SEs? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Pooria0 -
Linking Profile Gone Bad?!
Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links. It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam. Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tqinet0