What to do about unethical website company?
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I am working on SEO for a dental client, and I was looking at the external links for the main competitor. I noticed that a very large number of links were coming from other dental websites. When I looked more closely, I found that all of these websites had been created by one particular company specializing in dental websites. This company had hidden a directory on each client website with links to all their other client's websites. Is this something that can be reported? Is there anything I can do about it? Now I understand why I can't reach the number of external links that some of these other sites have!
There are also many links coming from an online bookmark manager. I'm guessing these are accounts set up just to generate external links. How can anyone compete with that?
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You can report link schemes to Google here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en
Here's Google's guidelines on link schemes:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en&rd=1
It's unlikely that you'll hear back from Google. The best thing you can do is report it, and move on to creating quality content and natural backlinks for your client. Google eventually catches on to manipulations.
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This type of practices have always been used by professional and controllers of specific fields or areas of business in order to ensure that they maintain their rankings whatever happens. Is like a loophole in the system that you may define as unethical and others as a way to earn a living.
is not an easy process to actually make this. It does take time and money, where most of the times is not worth it. Reporting such an issue is not easy.. you can either suffer or learn from this, cause if the did a good job and they remain untrecable from ownership distinction and other spam issues, then is highly unlikely to be negatively impacted in any way.
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