Understanding competitors link building tactics (possibly black hat stuff that seems to work)
-
So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes.
Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are:
-
Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links?
-
How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site?
-
How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!?
-
How are they not being penalised?
It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.
-
-
- Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links?
If they are small articles on a blog, they may be using blogvertise.com. A blog network that lets you buy links on the blogs on the network. The owner of the blog writes you a very small article with your link for a fee.
- How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site?
blogvertise.com again
- How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!?
Often these kind of tactics work for a time, but often they eventually do get some kind of penalty. These grey/blackhat tactics can work for months, or even years..often depending on how black they are.
- How are they not being penalised?
They might at some pont.
It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.
I always think a lot of link building is somewhat grey unless someone is linking to your content because its awesome without any incentive or encouragement. It's not perfect, but you have to work with it.
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
-
Do links from subdomains pass the authority and link juice of main domain ?
Hi, There is a subdomain with a root domain's DA 90. I can earn a backlink from that subdomain. This subdomain is fresh with no traffic yet. Do I get the ranking boost and authority from the subdomain? Example: I can earn a do-follow link from **https://what-is-crm.netlify.app/ **but not from https://netlify.app
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | teamtc0 -
Question RE: Links in Headers, Footers, Content, and Navigation
This question is regarding this Whiteboard Friday from October 2017 (https://moz.com/blog/links-headers-footers-navigation-impact-seo). Sorry that I am a little late to the party, but I wanted to see if someone could help out. So, in theory, if header links matter less than in-content links, and links lower on the page have their anchor text value stripped from them, is there any point of linking to an asset in the content that is also in the header other than for user experience (which I understand should be paramount)? Just want to be clear.Also, if in-content links are better than header links, than hypothetically an industry would want to find ways to organically link to landing pages rather than including that landing page in the header, no? Again, this is just for a Google link equity perspective, not a user experience perspective, just trying to wrap my head around the lesson. links-headers-footers-navigation-impact-seo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 3VE0 -
Competitor Drops 10,000 links since last index. Lets play detective.
One of the intriguing things about SEO is being able to reverse engineer your competitors rankings because all the technical information is available for those who know where to look. I recently looked at my Dashboard and saw that one of my competitors had dropped 10,000 links. The questions is why? Google algorthm change? Blackhat Penalty? Something else.? Here are the numbers, I am going to lieave my own clients site out because his numbers are pathetic. www.Leafly(dot)com 50.4k Links Down 10k www.thcfinder(dot)com 1,530 links Down 71 www.weedmaps(dot)com 64,000k links Up 1.5K Is it just me or is that a lot of links to loose over one indexing period?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidMeshah0 -
Getting Spam Links
Hi There, I am planning to Disavow one spam domain but when check Google cache it shows my client domain name. So if I disavow this spam domain which link Google considered? Please help me. Thanks Satla
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TrulyTravel0 -
Link Building / Link Removal
Hey, I'm in the process of learning SEO, or attempting to, for my company and am chipping away at the process ever so slowly! How can I tell if a site that links to my company's site, www.1099pro.com, has a negative effect on my page/domain authority? Also, if a page doesn't show up in the search rankings at all for it's keywords when it really should (i.e it has the exact keywords and page/domain authority far surpasses even the top results) how can I tell if Google has removed the page from its listing and why? Thanks SEO Gurus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Stew2220 -
Syndicated content outperforming our hard work!
Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. Our goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states. To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Wayne76
journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content/media is 100% original. A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entries are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.) (I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances.) I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources??? The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well? Are they bound to fade away? While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states. OR Is our competitor's site bound to fade away? Thanks, gang, hope all of you have a great 2013! Wayne0 -
Competitors and Duplicate Content
I'm curious to get people's opinion on this. One of our clients (Company A) has a competitor that's using duplicate sites to rank. They're using "www.companyA.com" and "www.CompanyAIndustryTown.com" (actually, several of the variations). It's basically duplicate content, with maybe a town name inserted or changed somewhere on the page. I was always told that this is not a wise idea. They started doing this in the past month or so when they had a site redesign. So far, it's working pretty well for them. So, here's my questions: -Would you address this directly (report to Google, etc.)? -Would you ignore this? -Do you think it's going to backfire soon? There's another company (Company B) that's using another practice- using separate pages on their domain to address different towns, and using those as landing pages. Similar, in that a lot of the content is the same, just some town names and minor details changed. All on the same domain though. Would the same apply to that? Thanks for your insight!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DeliaAssociates0 -
White Hat - Black Hat, Really confused?
I am I really new when it comes to SEO and especially link building. I have been hooked into websites ever since I did my first just writing content on what I loved. Then came the number one ranking and enquiries! Since that time I have created many websites and have always relied on good on page optimisation and have got great results in low competition keywords. Now I am trying to make a living out of this business with multiple websites retailing products I am hitting more moderate competition on keywords and have found myself on a 30 trial with SEOmoz. This has been a huge eye opener for a beginner and I have not had much sleep since analysing all the data that the tools can give. (My wife thinks I have an online mistress). What has really got me stuck is the link analysis on competitors open site explorer! As I am becoming a real SEO research geek and creating spreadsheets on my competitors links I am finding many are paid directory links! (one off 30 dollars’) . From what I understand from Google is that paid links are against their guidelines? These links are from sites that are ranking above me? What I am asking is should I follow suit in a fine balanced mix or stay clear of paid links completely? Where I always write unique content on experience for my content category pages the real chance of organic linking is slim. Is the only way forward to buy the odd cheeky link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jtay1230