Competitor Ranking High with Questionable Backlinks

[David-Kley]

Happy Friday Mozzers!

I wanted to pick your brains this morning, and see what your thoughts were on how Google missed this one.

One of our competitors is ranking high in Google, and has been for some time. About 5-6 months ago, his site skyrocketed from page 3-4 to the top of page one. The site meta tag is pulling in logo alt text, content is very messy and sales driven, and after looking at the backlink profile in MOZ tools, it has a ton of links from China, Japan, Korea. Most of the backlinks are from blog pages, about everything under the sun, from UFO's to porn sites. This site has consistantly ranked high at the top of the page for many different competitive keywords. My question is this: HOW? After all the updates done by Google, and their focus on web spam, what is allowing this site to rank high constantly?  (5-6 months now, and often in the number one spot).

Here is an example of some of the backlinks. There are a LOT of them.

http://sundtjek-wp.alexandra.dk/?p=1
http://ice.anyang.ac.kr/xe/teacher/2095
http://blog.so-net.ne.jp/etsuko_hayashi_ET3/2006-07-02

Don't worry, we are not looking to follow in his footsteps, lol. I was just wondering how this can happen, and for such a long time period.

[JaneCopland]

It can do - as others have said, there is a lot you can get away with with brilliant results if you manage to go undetected, and the linking pages' metrics are good enough to fool search engines about their quality. Spam still ranks - "churn and burn" link development (where you cycle through throw-away domains, ranking one for a short period for a highly-profitable keyword, putting a new site in its place when it is penalised / banned) still legitimately works too, but is obviously not most people's idea of a great long-term business plan if they have any desire to build a brand or use their online brands offline. But if you rank top-three for [buy cialis] for two weeks with a domain you spend $9 on and link development you can spin easily for new sites, you will come away with a healthy profit.

Not saying this is what your competitor is doing, and engaging in outright spam is a bad idea if you don't plan to ditch domain after domain, but it can absolutely still work if quick rankings are all you care about.

[David-Kley]

One of the things I noticed, is that the linking sites, even tho they are not related, and blog comment spam, have a high domain authority. I wonder if that plays a part in this at all.

[David-Kley]

Yes, I added it into OSE. That's actually where I found so many of them. You should see what is linking to this site, as it's truly scary. I would never want our domain to be a part of that. BUT, somehow it is working for them. Almost every link is something questionable, and not related at all. It's funny how Google will penalize hotvsnot and the like, but not this type of activity.

[Khem_Raj7]

It is quite common. You're safe till you're not caught.

David Liu is right, Google still not have any such mechanism which can instantly identify the bad or good. But what I don't agree with is "obeying the mantra 'build great content and they will come' will take you a long time to get where they are, if it ever does get you there"

Start targeting the top notch blogs in your industry to get referral links and recommendation, and it won't take much time to take you to get where your competitor is. Make sure the content you share bring some value to the blog force readers to share it with their social/ personal network.

My website is Adcart.com, we were no where, some 3 months back, in Google search results. But now you can enter any keyword, which comes to your mind by looking at our website and we rank in first 15 results and in top 10 for almost 90% queries. We just published in 13 high quality articles in exceptionally high quality blogs to achieve these results.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Have you put the URL's you listed into OSE? Obviously, DA is just a Moz thing, but I think it's a decent indicator. Of the three you listed it's, 50, 53, 88...those links range from solid to amazing, at least in terms of DA. It looks like the probably have a really good private network that google has caught on to yet.

[EGOL]

This is called.... "Surviving between the bomb craters."

It is actually a pretty common thing.   It is like people who drive over the speed limit all of the time but they just have not been caught yet.  They are simply "damn lucky".

So, I would not put much stock in improbable events.

[Kingof5]

Because Google still has a long way to go at determining high quality content vs. low quality content, determining good backlink profiles vs. bad backlink profiles, etc. It's like people who write viruses - whatever the antivirus companies are doing, the writers are a few steps ahead. Same with Google. They're reactive, not proactive

The kind of SEO your competitor is practicing works and it always will. You don't have to follow in their footsteps, but obeying the mantra 'build great content and they will come' will take you a long time to get where they are, if it ever does get you there. Think of SEO like investing - it's all about your risk tolerance. Figure out how much you're willing to risk to get the rankings/sales/etc. that you want and go for it.