My competitor's sneaky link building technique
-
Hi,
I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page. If you view her page source and type "/about" for example, it shows five examples of the text linking to her "about" page. But four of them can't be located on the web page (they are hidden). How does she do this? She basically has four duplicate links that are counted for SEO but can't be seen on the webpage.
address: http:// camilla peffer.com. au/
Any ideas?
-
As I understand it, Google only counts a link the first time it encounters it on a page, so if she's linking to the About page 5x from the same page, then only the first one counts and the other four are ignored. So I'm not sure I see the point in hiding those four other links unless it was somehow accidental or she's getting some really bad advice somewhere.
-
Yeah, I just figured it out as you replied. Thanks for the follow up.
-
adding the nav in to separate div and hid it accordingly... this is simple any developer will be able to do that!
But again, my recommendation is not to try this at all!!
-
Thanks for the answers EGOL and Moosa.
Moosa, out of interest, how is she doing it? I will take your advice and not worry about it. But how can she have four nav menus that aren't displayed on the website?
-
How is she hiding this is an easy part but if I would be at her place I won’t do that and this is because Google don’t like displaying different page to user and a different version to search engine bot. To me this is kind of gray hat.
If she is ranking at the moment she might not rank for a longer period of time and you will see a drop soon (may be in the next update).
I will highly recommend displaying the same version of the page to users as well as to search engine bots this way you become more transparent and you will see Google will lift up your rankings…soon!
Let’s wait and hope the Google to do justice a little sooner J.
Hope this helps!
-
Nah... I bet a month's pay that isn't it.
-
Argh.. I know, but that it is the reason she is no.1 in Google... double my links with half the page size. It's such an unfair advantage..
-
I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page.
Putting invisible stuff into your pages is not a good idea. Google is well known for slappin' people down if they have stuff in their code that is not shown to visitors.
So, time spent trying to figure out "how your competitor is doing this" is better spent just chucklin' about it and getting straight back to the work of making a good website.
I rarely look at my competitors' code. I might do that for about ten seconds per year. I don't have enough time to make all of the content that I need. Its best to spend time on that.
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
-
What To Focus On SEO / Link Building for this campaign to rank again..
Hi All; I recently joined Moz and I am really starting to learn a lot here. I am still finding it difficult to figure out what to focus on the most to improve my rankings (although I do have some page 1 ranks) I have one strong competitor who has a SOLID spot in the top 5 of google for the past few years for the keyword I would like to be ranked for again. (as they have always been a competitor of mine either 1 spot above or 1 spot below). then i fell off google in January and finally made it back to page 1. But their links are thousands higher than mine. What parts of my SEO Link Building should I focus on the MOST to improve my ranking to move up a few spots? Followed links vs No Followed Links Followed Linking Root Domains vs NoFollowed Linking Root Domain Any help would so greatly be appreciated; also please explain why you would focus on that part of my campaign so I can better understand as well. Thanks again
Competitive Research | | Circa
(there are 3 images total) t4klvWZ,I9R9BsC,fbDoF3L#20 -
Would sharing the same IP address with competitors in the same market hurt SEO?
I work for the Chevy dealership in New York who is trying to rank against other Chevy dealerships in the same area. All the dealerships, including my client, are using the same Chevy endorsed CMS (Cobalt). I just noticed that all of these competitors, including my client, are using the SAME IP address. Would it be beneficial to SEO if we were to ditch the Cobalt platform and choose another one that gave us a unique IP address? Have any of you run into this before? Any help would be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | tjkirgin0 -
Can I write guest blogs on competitor's blogs?
I have been doing some guest blogging and its hard to find guest blogs opportunities. I have found some but they are direct competitors. Is it safe to write guest post? by the way the are not local competitors. Any suggestion please. thanks
Competitive Research | | conversiontactics0 -
Why does my site get sandboxed but this one doesn't?
I'm currently working on an entire website redesign and restructuring. My current website is extremely spammy. I really worked on it before I knew much about SEO. Now that I have a better foundation I have been remaking my site to get rid of duplicate content and to have a much better UX. With this said, I still depend on the current site to bring in my income while I'm working on getting my new site up. Google seems to constantly kick me out for about a month at a time and then let me back in. The few other times I thought it was because the new site I have been working on is on a different domain and was exactly the same for a while (I don't want google to find this new domain it's just for testing purposes). So I removed the new domain from google and in a couple weeks my main site was back in. Problem is yesterday google hit me again. I'm out of google for all my search terms. Before I was ranking on the first page for just about every "keyword + city" phrase I was trying to rank for. I can find plenty of reasons why google would give me problems with my current site. For example I have TONS of duplicate pages with just the keyword/city changed. Pretty spammy. I did buy about 5 links a year ago or so but they are pretty nothing sites. My question is if google's going to ban me why don't they just do it? They keep taking me out and putting me back in. No messages in webmaster tools. My domain is below: http://yourmusiclessons.com Also when I just started out I got the idea of "keyword + city" from a competitor that ranks for EVERYTHING which is also found below: http://www.musikalessons.com All of the links I bought were the same links the above site bought. I tried buying a link from classical.net which has a high page rank and links to musikalessons.com on each page of their site. As soon as google found the links, I was kicked out. I had them remove it. My question is musika has basically the same "spammyness" as me just on a much larger scale and yet they never seem to be kicked out of google and still rank high. I've thought about reporting musika, but I'm afraid Google will ban me as well because my site is just as bad. Again I'm working all day on fixing my site and doing a 180, it's just taking a long time and I can't launch quite yet. I live off the income from my current site though, so it's very disheartening when this happens. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | BrianJenkins0 -
Link analysis competitors
Am I missing something here or does SEO Moz only support three competitor sites to do comparisons against in each campaign? If not where do I add another website to the list to compare against? Thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | AdenBrands0 -
Crazy SEO question (maybe I'm missing something?)
OK - so one of our customers just called us and told us an interesting story: A local SEO company called her yesterday to try to sell their services to her. She's in the process of starting SEO services with us, so she told them she wasn't interested. The sales guy told her that they were better (without even asking who she was currently using) and asked her for a term that she'd like to rank higher for. She said she'd like to rank higher for "spray in bedliners northern ky" and he said "Gotcha, call you tomorrow" He called back just now and told her to look at Google. She's now ranking number one for that term. He didn't have access to her site, so he wasn't able to change anything on her site. He won't tell her what he did, and told her it was legitimate - but it seems to me that with only off-site tactics, it'd be nearly impossible to white-hat her site to number one overnight... Any ideas what he's doing? First of all, we want to be able to tell her what he's doing, because she's curious. More importantly, we want to be sure he's not doing anything black-hat that's going to hurt our client's site. Thanks for your help, Mozzers!
Competitive Research | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Link submissions confirmed but not showing up in OSE
One of the first things I did after signing up for the 30-day seomoz trial is analyze 3 competitor's inbound links from external sites. On the Competitive Domain Analysis page, I was able to obtain links from more than half of the sites identified as their top links. All submissions were approved between 9/13 and 9/28. Now, a month later, under the Competitive Comparison section, I only have one external followed link, while the competitors have hundreds. For Top Pages, the only page that shows up is the root domain, comitzlaw.com/. For two of the competitors, 7 out of their top 10 links are from pview.findlaw.com/. I have a link from the same site, confirmed as of mid-September, yet it doesn't show up. Any ideas? I must be doing something seriously wrong.
Competitive Research | | c2g0 -
Whats the best way to see why your competitor is out ranking you?
I am trying to rank in the number on position for Part Time CFO. Currently we are in 2nd and 3rd. We have way more quality inbound links then the site in first position, more content etc. How would you go about investigating why they are ahead of us?
Competitive Research | | b2bcfo0