Can somebody tell me if this is a black hat tactic??
-
I'm new to SEO, so somebody needs to explain to me what is kosher or not.
Playing around with opensiteexplorer I came across a network of websites that all link together from a page of links, only the linking page is hidden to the viewer, with an empty anchor tag or something small like a period.
example http://zinasdayspa.com/ links to http://zinasdayspa.com/links_baltimore_hair_salon_day_spa_fells_point_federal_hill_canton_maryland.phpwith a tag at the very bottom, that links to http://www.6611111.com.
It's interesting because some of these websites rank high with google, but when I do link:http://www.6611111.com, google shows no results!
Something very strange is about this, and I wanted to know how http://www.6611111.com ranks so high for such a competitive keyword such as stop smoking, and if this is blackhat. My intuition tells me it is, but I'm also curious how it ranks high.
-
I'd agree with what Ash said in that this technique isn't strictly speaking "black hat" - although the definition of black hat is open to interpretation! I checked their backlink profile on Open Site Explorer and found lots of evidence of this tactic being used lots and lots of targeting of exact match anchor text:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.6611111.com%2F
This level of exact match anchor text is probably the reason they are ranking for various keywords. However this is the type of link building that Google doesn't particularly like, at least not when it makes up the majority of your link profile. So I'd expect it to stop working for them at some point once Google figure it out properly and reduce the value of those links.
I hope that helps a bit!
-
Just an update. I showed this to a friend of mine who is a SEO expert. He also doesn't know either.
-
I was away so couldn't respond to this.
Thank you very much for the response. Actually I wrote the 'stop smoking' from memory, but if I do 'stop smoking hypnosis', another highly competitive keywords, it shows on the 2nd page,
If this is a red flag tactic, how do they rank so high for such a competitive words???
Thanks
-
This linking isn't black-hat -- it is simply old-school SEO with the use of a Links page, which has long been noted as a red flag. Note that the links page shows a grey bar for the Toolbar PR, suggesting that Google has noted it as a links page. Most of those sites are off-topic for this hair salon, so the link juice is wasted and the page has become irrelevant for its ostensible purpose.
I cannot see 6611111.com ranking for "stop smoking" in the first 400 results, You might be seeing personalised results, so use an incognito browser and clear your cookies and cache. Log out of all Google services before running the search.
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 can I put on a 404 page?
When it comes to SEO what can I put on a 404 page? I want to add content that actually makes the page useful so visitors will more likely stay on the website. Most pages just have a big image of 404 and a couple sentences saying what happened. I am wondering if Google would like if there was blog suggestions or navigational functions?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JoeyGedgaud0 -
Can anyone tell me why this site ranks so well?
Site in question: cellphoneshop.net From what I can tell from their link profile, the links they garner don't appear to be particularly high value but they dominate organic listings for my vertical (cell phone accessories), esp. in the last 2-3 months when Google was supposedly increasing the quality of their search results. Can anyone tell me why in particular this site ranks so well for competitive short and long tail terms?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eugeneku0 -
Geotag city different from postal address. Can I mention both cities together in title tags?
This boundary thing seems to be haunting me at the mo. Oh what I'd give for somewhere within a defined boundary! Anyway, just noticed a client has one city in its official postal address, and another city under its geotag. So I'm looking at the title tags and I'm thinking of mentioning both cities on the main entry pages (6 of them) then dividing mention in sub pages. Is this acceptable to Google? Might they see mention of both cities in homepage title tag (and other entry pages) as spammy. I don't want to upset Google!!! PS. Both cities are core markets. I would say they're of equal importance in terms of current business bookings and business potential.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Does Google Penalize for Managing multiple Google Places from the same IP Address? Can you manage from same google account or separate? Or does it matter since it's created from the same IP?
I manage a number of client's Google Places from the same IP and heard this is not a good thing. Are there Do's and Don'ts when managing multiple Google Places? Create separate google accounts for each or can you use the same account?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Souk0 -
Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics
A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOptPro
http://seoptimization.pro
[email protected]0 -
Can I get harmed by an inlink?
Hi! I'll jump right in to my question. There's a webpage with the following stats:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mozalbin
PA 80, mR 4.70, mT 5.00. Pagerank ZERO. Now, these are some beautiful stats for every webpage, except for the pagerank. The reason to why the pagerank is so low is that the inlinks to this site is partial spammy (hidden links and other bad naughty black-hat stuff that I hate). (It's not my webpage, I don't even know whos webpage this is..) I happen to have a backlink from this page. A clean dofollow, in-content link to my site. The total amount of external links on this page is five and there's no spam on the page or hidden anywhere else. My question #1:
Is this particular inlink to my site harmful? Will I get penaltized for getting a backlink from this site? I mean, Google have figured out the spam factor of the links to the page that is linking to me. But I'm innocent, the link to me is just lying there... (Why or why not?) My question #2:
IF (and only IF) the link to my webpage is harmful. Are links from my page harmful? (Why or why not?) Thank you very much for using you awesome knowledge to answer this 🙂0