Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Questions created by Femamedia
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Is it allowed to buy an old website with external links en redirect it to your own site??
Hello, We noticed at MOZ that one of our competitor's websites has increased the number of external backlinks from 5k to 25k within a month. Upon investigating the links, we found that the competitor had acquired an old, unknown website with completely different content and external links in that month. The competitor then redirected that purchased website to their own website, instantly gaining 20k external links. This seems to be against Google's guidelines as it is an extremely unnatural way of link building and should be penalized by search engines. However, the website's Domain Authority (DA) has increased by 10 points in that month, and its rankings have greatly improved on Google. So it appears that acquiring an old website with many external links unrelated to your own website is highly profitable. We try to obtain links honestly, but we cannot reach 25k links naturally. Is there any way to report these practices to Google? Does anyone know how to do this?
Competitive Research | | Femamedia0