Spam Link Building Discovered - What would you do?
-
Hi Mozers,
After investigating our no 1 competitor we have discovered their 87k back links comparing to ours 1k. After dipper investigations we discovered that all the back links are gained by the websites created by themselves.
So what they did is - they had purchased 10+ domains and created 10+ new websites that are identical as their original .com version. EVERY SINGLE LINK on these 'new' websites link to their .com version. The 'New' websites are not indexed.
Literally each of us can do the same and gain thousands of back links, but isn't it violating google's policy?
What are your thought on it?
(What is the best practice to report the violation of google's policy to Google?)
Best regards,
Lana
-
Thank you for your time Egol. According to Moz our website is outranking my competitor's website in all other metrics other than total external links. Hope we will outrank them on google as well
And thank you Josh and Highland for sharing your thoughts, it was really helpful.
-
I always remind people that Black Hat techniques like this can succeed in the short term but seldom produce the desired result in the long term. Google has a small army of highly paid smart people who want to catch things like this (see Panda, Penguin, etc). When Google does catch this (assuming they haven't already) they will almost certainly face some sort of penalty.
My bet is they're spending the newness of their sites on this technique (a new site has no rank but no penalties either). It probably gives some initial boost until Google catches on with their slower systems (Panda and Penguin are both slow in refreshing). A spam report to Google might draw a manual penalty to the main site but, as Egol said, this is a lot of wasted time and effort on their part.
-
I am more amused than bothered by competitors who do this. Those "manufactured websites" do not have any links into them from other legitimate sites, so they have no link power to pass to the competitor's main site. This activity has zero benefit in my opinion. If these competitors have good rankings, I believe that it must come from other things that they are doing.
I hope that all of my competitors spend at least 50% of their development budgets on this activity. I have no fear of it. In addition to being a waste of their time, I think that doing this can damage their main website's ability to rank.
-
Thank you for the respond Egol,
Right, but original .com version is not deindexed (!?) and that is the issue at the first place. They are manufacturing links and it works for a long time now. Their .com website still ranks high.
As you have said 'Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time' - killing ONE of those pages or sites is not sufficient enough. What about the original page/site which still ranks? Nobody cares for their duplicate websites being deindexed.
Than you have said 'In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.' - well, the one website which ranks is all they need :). If 'sometimes' will be damaged, than it still means that it is OK to manufacture links by duplicating website, and take the risk to 'maybe' become deindexed.
Theoretically every website owner can create duplicate websites and manufacture tons of back links. It makes the white hat link building pointless. If you ask me this is very much violating google's policy and they should be reported. Otherwise, why don't all of us do the same!?
It is irritating to see someone acting spammy getting better rankings...
-
"Manufactured links" on "duplicate websites" have been discounted by Google for at least 15 years. If you build an identical website and link from Identical Page A to Identical Page B, Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time. In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.
If these people were competing against me, I would enjoy seeing them buy a few more domains and put time into tossing up identical sites. No need to report them. Google has deindexed these "New" websites.
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 can i build back link for competitor website
please tell me how can i build back link for competitor back link how can i check competitor back link
Link Building | | Vikran0 -
Link Building Issue
Hi, While prospecting for backlinks target do you guys filter links less than a specific DA or PA? for instance - if PA<5 then remove
Link Building | | Janki99
My VA accidentally selected a PA 3 link where the site owner eventually gave us a backlink.
Due to that link the traffic jumped 14X!!!
Had it been my filtering process would never got the backlink and traffic. What do you guys suggest?0 -
Uk link building
Hello mozzers, I have a UK website that I have slowly been building high quality links to from highly trusted websites, traffic is slowly but steadily rising. So far all the links i've built are on UK websites. I've discovered there are many opportunities to get links from loosely related US websites. Would links from highly trusted US domains help my UK rankings? Would they help, but not as much as UK links? I'd be very grateful to hear anyones thoughts on this. Thank you so much!
Link Building | | lucyN0 -
Can 302's Negate Spam Link Profile?
To make a long story short, the previous SEO company we hired spammed us on LOTS of crappy links, many of which are still indexed. We're currently in the act of removing these links before we receive a manual spam penalty/notification + building new, stronger links to balance out our profile. While most of these garbage links were sent to our homepage, many are linking our Services page (and a bunch to our .com/sitemap.html for some reason, lol). Now we're in the midst of updating our entire website and the permalinks are going to change. While I'd normally 301 our old links to the new ones, Id rather not bring the horrible link profile with it if at all possible. Would a simple 302 redirect effectively dodge the bad juju from these spam links to our Services page since they pass 0 juice? Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks!
Link Building | | kirmeliux0 -
Internal Link Building
For a large part of our SEO we have been focusing on inbound links (mainly from guest posts and blogger reviews). But our rankings have dropped (though I understand there is a natural fluctuation in rankings quite often) this week and it occurred to me that we should be focusing more on internal link building as well. We, of course, link often to our home page and have related products on every page but we lack a lot of direct key word links in in our description. Would it behoove us to be on a specific product page--take for example owls and friends wall decals--and somewhere in the description add something like "our nursery wall decals are safe for....and have "nursery wall decals" be the direct link since that is a key term for us? I just wanted to make sure that we are headed in the right direction before I spend a massive amount of time updating all these product pages. Any input would be really helpful. Thanks so much, Elizabeth
Link Building | | WNL0 -
I am getting links on people's wordpress blogs but are not showing up on the just discovered tool. Is it true that wordpress links are no-follow links that do give off any link-juice?
A blogger told me that "wordpress.com does not allow blogs to show advertisements or use links to sites that sell merchandise of any kind" is this true? Am i wasting my outreach time trying to get links from wordpress operated blogs?
Link Building | | odegi0 -
LInk Building Ideas for Large Site
Hi, I have a very large sized website of about 5 Million Pages. Earlier i used to rank very well with many naturally occurred links, But now, i lost my rankings with numerous Google updates. My content is user generated content and it wont be pure original as my users will post the same on other forums too. I all of my pages rank on #1 page for their keywords. Can anyone suggest me good link building strategy for larger websites as each url will have different keyword, i want all of my urls to be ranked well. Waiting for your replies.
Link Building | | Vegitss0 -
Link Building strategy between domains I own?
I am in the somewhat unique position of owning and administering around 300 websites that each have their own unique domain names. We have a corporate website and then many individual websites for hospitals and nursing centers that we operate. My question is how would you recommend using these sites to build good incoming links between all the sites? Should I take every opportunity to find as many places to link from each site to all the other sites that are owned? Is there anything I should avoid that Google would penalize me for or discount the links all together? Sorry this is a such as long question... but wasn't sure where to start. Thanks!
Link Building | | KHCreative0