Problems with link spam from spam blogs to competitor sites
-
A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market.
My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!).
This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty.
Ideas? Thoughts?
All help appreciated
-
Ditto. I am facing a competitor who is similarly succeeding by using comment spam tactics. It seems fairly certain to me that Google is giving some value to these links even though most of them are no-followed. I suspect that at some future date they may get better at devaluing them or penalizing for them, however, at present comment spamming seems to be an advantageous tactic.
-
Agreed!
-
Are you sure that those spammy links are what is helping them rank?
I wouldn't drop to their level, but focus on white hat marketing. And if you want links, create a new campaign targeted on building solid relationships for the good links.
It may not be right now, but Google is slowly rewarding better content sites.
-
I have dealt with a competitor like this and have recently finally climbed ahead of them in the SERPS for our keyword. Unfortunately if you send a spam report to Google that this website is getting spammy links, they will probably put your message in the trash bin. Don't ask me why, someone bascially told me this and after my experiences with complaining to Google about so and so doing naughty things online, I haven't seen any action taken.
Except for one time, but that's because we were in a large market and this particular website jumped from number 20 to number 1 in less than 10 days.
The way I have combated these link spammers is buy figuring out how they are getting the links and where they are getting the links from and try to mimic them in the most white hat way possible (which leads to some gray hat tactics).
Forexample, one of our competitors were getting many many blog links from the home pages. So we decided to create a widget and literally sponsored the widget on their home page (this really isn't white hat, but it's close enough). We have done the same with Infographics, and buying guest posts.
Also we stayed away from any website that screams out spam or irrelevant to our websites we were working on.
I personally wouldn't jump into the spamming methods your competitors are doing simply because you never know is Google's Panda decides to take steroids one day and ruin your website over night like many websites have been ruined from the first couple Panda updates.
Play fair and beware of Google and the dirty tricks they don't like.
Hope this helps
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
-
How to find Spam Website?
Hi guys, I'm seo newbie and really want to find websites that hurt seo ranking to avoid get link. Which tools or trick can help me to find those site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | denakalami0 -
Competitor Inbound Links Increase from 175K to 1 million in 1 month, how?
Hi all, I was recently doing some competitive analysis on external links/DA and came across something peculiar. A competitor of ours had their external links go from 175,179 in August to 1,141,365 in September. I've attached a screenshot showing the increase. The competitors domain authority also increased from 82 to 89 in the same time span. Has anyone else come across such a large link increase in such a short period of time, while also being rewarded for it? Obviously at first glance it seemed extremely black hat and unnatural, but I would love to be proven wrong. Thanks! Cw5tN
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mstpeter0 -
Traffic going down in all sites in a niche
Hello, A client has three Ecommerce sites in a niche. Because of competition and a (possibly) non manual penalty due to doorways and paid links (though I think it's mainly competition too) our traffic is going down. What are the keys to increasing traffic at this point. Feel free to include tricks that cost money. A Hrefs (I love Moz though!) has some neat content tricks. Please give me the best tricks in the industry to increase traffic. We're adding content to the main site of the three and maybe that's what to focus on, but we're having trouble driving serious traffic with the content. We need serious traffic. We are experts in our field and capable of almost anything as far as information goes in our field. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Backlink, how to delete or find who is linking to me?
Hi there guys, Can someone tell me how I go about finding who is linking to my site or how to find backlinks to my site and if it is a spam site or a site I don't know or want linking to me, how to stop them from linking to me and also how to delete their link? Thanks appreciate the time Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
What could go wrong? SEO on mobile site is different than desktop site.
We have a desktop site that has been getting worked on over the year regarding improving SEO. Since the mobile site is separate, the business decided to not spend the time to keep it updated and just turned it off. So any mobile user that finds a link to us in search engines, goes to a desktop site that is not responsive. Now that we're hearing Google is going to start incorporating mobile user friendliness into rankings, the business wants to turn the mobile site back on while we spend months making the desktop site responsive. The mobile site basically has no SEO. The title tag is uniform across the site, etc. How much will it hurt us to turn on that SEO horrid mobile site? Or how much will it hurt us to not turn it on?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Site review
Can any one give me a quick site review, recently started work for the company on the seo, just want to asking if I am missing anything that may hinder SEO and SERPs etc www.teamac.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TeamacPaints0 -
Would you consider this keyword spam?
See these pages that we've created to rank. There are 3 types: Designed to be topic-specific:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mase
https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/trademark Designed to be location-specific:
https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/san-francisco Designed to be a combo of both topic & location:
https://www.upcounsel.com/lawyers/san-francisco-real-estate Are the keywords at the bottom too many and considered keyword spam? Any other SEO tips on these pages? I'm thinking about making them a bit more hierarchical, so there can be breadcrumbs and you could click back to San Francisco Lawyers from San Francisco Real Estate Lawyers. Good examples of sites that have dome structures like this really well?0 -
Competitors Developing Spammy Link For My Website
Well Guys there are lot of discussions in almost all the communities, blogs, forums about Post Penguin impact. Google says that if find that you're involved in any link building activities, we may penalize you. People out there have already started their developed links. But what if our competitors would have developed those links. Initially it was okay to develop one way links, I even developed lot of quality, but deliberately, links. around 95% links are placed manually, if return to some favor or money but all links looks natural. Most of the links I developed through content only, like articles, blog comments, PR submission, etc now really skeptical about the quality (after hearing lot of talks and reading n number of posts). Now, can I also submit my competitor's websites in 1000 topic directory (obviously not in any spammy directory), would it effect that website adversely? What if I spun an existing content and submit it into 500 article directories and give backlink to competitor site from using only one anchor text (which is obviously the main keywords - highest sales generating keyword) I look forward to some experts comments.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Khem_Raj70