Questionable backlinks...
-
One of our competitors (who are ranking top spot ) have this trend of building backlinks from websites build for the sole purpose of seo. (see example) When you see the website it's just a submission of articles from different companies trying to rank for a certain keyword most of the time poorly written.
Our competitor seems to be doing this a lot...
What do you guys think, is it just a matter of time before Google cracks down on them or is this technique actually working for them? (even though it's rather grey hat) Or... could it be someone trying to build "poor" backlinks to them in an attempt to push them of the Google throne -
I agree the strategy is ill-conceived. Either it was executed by an incompetent company, or one that is into "churn and burn" tactics. By the time Google catches on, it will have moved on to the next client.
-
I'm not to worried about the timing of the penalty just rather curious about their strategy and even after all Google's attempts to stamp out this style of SEO it looks like many are still practising it. I think it's interesting to see that sometimes these methods can still deliver results although they are probably juggling a ticking time bomb
-
I realise the links might be disavowed but they are very fresh so it looks like recent work. I also think the SEO company put their own details on the first link i supplied... maybe their client doesn't even know this is going on
-
Just a little note to add to the other comments...
Doing backlink analysis on competitors is very tricky nowadays thanks to the disavow tool. For all you know, your competitor has disavowed these links and Google is no longer counting them which would explain why they are still ranking so well.
The example website you supplied is undoubtedly paid for posts and as they are not no-followed, the website is not going to be passing any benefits to those linking from the website.
-
You can gather a list of domains and backlinks to this site that you think are spam and influencing this site's rankings unnaturally and then submit a spam report. This can help to speed up the process.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1
-
You could do a whois lookup for clues that the sites are run by the same SEO company (or at least people trying to cover their tracks.) But what's the point?
As a former editor, I can tell just be reading the articles that they were likely written by the same semi-literate person. I'd even speculate the author is not a native English speaker. That said, it's clear the articles were written by a human in some semblance of English.
So it may take Google longer to spot that articles that it would for spun or computer-generated articles. That said, there are big problems with articles. These include low word counts on very thin sites. The Google algo is good at catching this -- eventually.
I'm guessing you're in the same situation I was. A competitor hired a sleazy SEO company. The SEO company used three techniques:
- links from article directories
- links from once-legit sites it had acquired and corrupted
- links from sites it had created itself
In all, there were more than 100 links from crappy articles. Eventually all but 3 were devalued. But it took almost a year.
As I said below, there is not much you can do beyond focussing on what you can control: your own SEO efforts.
You could submit a spam report to Google. But short of criminal misconduct (my rival hacked my site and here is the police report) Google will almost certainly not take individual, manual action against your competitor. It generally looks for abusive patterns and rolls the information into algo updates.
I understand your frustration. But my tough lough advice is:
Stop fretting about what your rival is doing and get down to work on your site.
-
Thanks for your thoughts on this guys, much appreciated! Here are some other websites used example 1 example 2 example 3 example 4 and there is more...
What are the chances of these websites al being run by the same seo company ?
Some of the articles are so bad i can't believe this stuff is still getting results!
It also looks like majority of the articles are pretty recent or do they just keep changing the dates?And is there a way to make Google catch on to these sites sooner?
-
I agree with the above: it's almost certainly just a matter of time before the smackdown comes.
The wait can be frustrating, though.
Been there, done that, waited it out -- and it took almost a year.
In the meantime, just focus on the nuts and bolts of on-page, while building quality content and backlinks.
What else can you do?
If it's any consultation, the smackdown can be huge and sudden. When it finally comes.
-
Hi Immanuel,
While I can't comment on the site in question and their backlink profile because you haIt ven't shared it, what I can tell you is a bit more information about weekendpost, the site you did share as one of the sites in this company's backlink profile. Looking at a random site with articles built for link building purposes, it is pretty rare that you find a site like this with a PR of 5 in this day and age. Many of these were smacked by Google in the various updates and penalties, with public PR often reduced as a public indication of this site's devaluation. However, the site you shared has a toolbar PR of 5 and a homepage authority of 57, clearly a stronger site than your usual hastily built article spam site.
Looking closer into the history of the site using the Wayback Machine, you can see that this site was once an actual legitimate site and source of weekend news. It started accruing links in 2011, and this is where much of the site's strength comes from. At some point the domain was likely dropped and picked up and converted to an article site for links. Whois further signifies that there was a change in registration of the site with 1 drop.
Do I think Google will eventually catch up with this site and devalue its links if they haven't already? Certainly. But in the short term, links from this site may be boosting up other sites. I don't think this is a good long term solution, but I can see the benefit from links from a strong site (according to metrics at least) like this in the short term.
Mark
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
-
Question regarding Aggregate Rating
We have a directory site with multiple listings. Currently, our page structure is fragmented for each of the tabs (about, products, reviews, etc) with canonicals going back to the main listing page. This includes the reviews as well. Review aggregate is marked up and the stars are rendering in the SERPs. We are planning to break out reviews to /reviews and including a paginated series, then all of the tabs (about, products, NOT reviews) will be javascript loading content so no more fragmented URLs. Right now, I suspect that the stars are rendering on the main listing page because the review page that is currently fragmented has a canonical back to the main listing page. The main listing page also is marked up with the review aggregate. if we break out /reviews, all of the reviews will live on /reviews. If we break out /reviews to it's own URL, will we have to have a small amount of reviews on the main listing page to have the stars render in the SERPs for the main listing page?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
How did I get over 1000 backlinks in less then a month? help?
Hi Guys I'm a newbie and just started my website, im wondering if im reading this correctly, i use a tool called my seo tools and its telling me my website zenory.co.nz has over 1600 backlinks, this is scary since the site is only 5months old and i didn't see this till at least today and i check my sites backlinks on a regular basis. However when I check with moz it says I only have 2? I'm a little confused. Any advice here? Much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Manual Penalty Question
Hello dear MoZ community, I have already communicated this problem before but now it reaches to a level I have to make some hard decisions and would like your help. One of our new accounts (1 month old) got a manual penalty notification few weeks ago from Google for unnatural link building. I went through the whole process, did link detox and analysis and indeed there were lots of blog networks existing purely for cross linking. I removed these and the links got decreased dramatically. The company had around 250,000 links and truth be told if I go by the book only 700-800 of them are really worth and provide value. They will end up with roughly 15000 -20000 left which I acknowledge are a lot but some are coming from web 2 properties such as blogger, wordpress etc. Because the penalty was in some of the pages and not the whole web site I removed the ones that I identified were harming the web site, brought the anchor text down to normal levels and filed a very detailed reconsideration request and disavow file. I do not have a response so far by webmasters but here is where my concerns begin: Should I go for a new domain? losing 230.000 links ? How can there even be a "reconsideration" request for a web site with 85% of its link profile being cross linking to self owned directories and web 2 properties? If I go for a new domain should I redirect? Should I keep the domain, keep cleaning and adding new quality links so I take it with a fresh new approach? Thanks everyone in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | artdivision0 -
Build Backlinks on this site? - Advice Please
Hello, I am trying to build some backlinks to my E-Commerce site and was wondering how you all view sites like this: http://www.bookmark4you.com/ If I were to put a listing for my company/site on that site, would that be considered a good backlink or a bad backlink (in terms of Google's guidelines)... There are a bunch of sites like these, online directory or bookmark sites, and i was wondering what the general opinion is on using them for backlinking purposes. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. THANKS!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Prime850 -
Low Quality Highly Relevant backlinks, should we get them?
I see a lot of opportunity to get lower quality, but highly relevant backlinks, should we try to get these? I'll give you an example, lets say we have an asphalt paving company ( not a lot of authority blogs out there, that we can find yet) We found this one http://www.wolfpaving.com/blog/ - DA of 27 and PA 29 should we go after links like this. I would actually like to know about sites with less authority than this one, I would probably go for this one without question. So Should we go after worse DA and PA but still legitimate looking sites and highly relevant?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Backlinks
When examining our inventory of backlinks (and our competition's), is it more important to look at overall domain authority or page authority where the backlink comes from?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Relfdy250 -
Will the links coming from an article in certain BLOG / NEWS SITE become a GOOD BackLink?
Such as, if i wrote a ymoz, and suddenly the articles is accepted, will the link to our site coming out of that Article Post increased our SEO Standing? Another example would be http://active.tutsplus.com , yesterday i have successfully pitched a tutorial idea, and they told me to write it so that they can published it , and they also promised that i will be able to put my site link (dofollow) ... But will these link be a Good BackLink that will increase our site's SEO Standing? The last one is exactly the same link , but this time coming from a News Site , such as http://teknologi.kompasiana.com/internet/2011/06/09/website-full-flash-dengan-inovasi-hebat-karya-indonesia/ , in this article (kompasiana is a very wellknown site news in Indonesia, in fact KOMPAS is the biggest newspaper firm in Indonesia) , our site is being featured , there is a link coming out of that article (DOFOLLOW), but will that link make our site much more SEO Friendly? Again please enlighten me 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IKT0 -
Do backlinks with good anchor text from bad sites help?
Hi, In the Netherlands, the SEO competition for terms like loans is very competitive. I see a website in this industry that seems to be doing very well based on links with good anchor text from sites that seem quite worthless to me, such as: http://www.online-colleges-helper.com/ and http://www.alohapath.com/ My question is: is it worth pursuing this type of links? I assume these must be paid links, or am I wrong? I'd really rather not go down this route but I don't want to be outranked by someone who is using these types of links... Many thanks in advance for any type of insight! Annemieke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnnemiekevH0