Competitor ranking through SPAM
-
We have a competitor called SwitchWise who has done a whole heap of social bookmarking and article marketing, using a deceptive link with anchor text reading "i select electricity" which has got them ranking #2 in Australia for the term iselect (a big comparison company here in Aus).
The articles are low value, the link is deceptive and it is generally bad for the consumer. I could copy their tactics for my client, but I'm concerned about the links eventually being devalued and the company placed in the sin bin.
What is the best course of action as I really don't want to let them get away with this, either we need to be up there, or alternative we need to dislodge them.
p.s I know this is not a great keyword, but it's more about stakeholder management in terms of what my client sees and how they interpret what we are doing relative to their competitors.
-
Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback.
-
Hi Joshua,
Overall the competition doesn't look terribly high for that keyword. I always opt to keep it clean insofar as inbound link quality. There is very little reason you couldn't move SelectWise out of position two for this keyword.
Try the comparison product approach in inbound links. It helps the links look more editorial as opposed to trying to rank a competitor / alternate website for a potential brand or trademarked term company.
-
Check to see if they are buying links 1st. If they are, then you may be able to report them though Google Webmasters and they an get hammered. I did this for one of my shady competitors and they got wacked in the SERPS by Google. f they are article spinning, then I don't think you can really do anything about it. Anybody can article spin.
-
My client is not iselect, they are a direct competitor to switchwise.
It is more a question of risk and reward v danger. I don't really want to copy their SPAMMY tactics for the risk of having our site penalized, but it is hurting my relationship with my client for every day they stay there.
-
If your client is iSelect? It is down to them to them to do brand reputation management on the term, using their own properties "brand owned" to out rank the specific Switch Wise domain.
Really it raised an argument: is Switch Wise an affiliate of iSelect? Should they be targeting the brand terms via the organic space, it is easy to switch the off button on paid but with organic you really need to do your own reputation management.
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
-
Does removing pages, so that they return 404, also remove any impact of spam links pointing to that page?
A site with numerous spam links pointing to an old forum. The forum is now removed so do I need any further action? thanks,
Link Building | | ElaineDesignLobby0 -
Do spam text links count for negative seo?
I run a high-PR (or whatever we're calling it now) website builder. When you sign up, your URL is a subdomain of the main site (like yourname.foo.com). My site is lucky enough to be on the spammers radar, so they frequently create sites to get more back links. A while back, I caught onto this and neutralized their links (even though they had nofollow tags) by only displaying them as plain text instead of anchor tags. Spammers continue to sign up and create sites, even though their links are now text. My question: Are these text links still affecting my SEO negatively? Or do they know something I don't?
Link Building | | watilo0 -
I am searching for page ranks but all results show 0
i am searching for page ranks but all results show pr 0 when i search, doesnt matter if the site is a pr ma or a pr10, i was using scrapebox to find the backlinks but now nothing is showing as far as pr goes, i have also used various websites to check the page ranks and still get the same results. maybe its my ip but i doubt it cus i am using private proxies. any idea guys? cRbWC65
Link Building | | djgbshows0 -
How can I find page 1 google keyword rankings for a certain page?
Not sure if someone has a tool for this yet or not... Say I have a page like this: http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Spokane.Painting.Pros.509-210-2799 and I would like to find out what keywords this page ranks for on google. Is there any tool that I can paste in that link and it would give me keywords that it ranks well for? Other than the SEO moz rank checker. It's not like I want to run a campaign just for links like that but I might want to build some links to citations like that so I can move those citations up in the rankings.
Link Building | | Superflys0 -
Our ranking strategy - what to add and would it work?
Hello everyone, this is actually my first time to ask here so please be kind to me. I won't consider myself an expert on SEO, I originally studied to become a writer. I've been learning SEO for the past 1 1/2 years but recently I've encountered a wall. One of our clients wanted to rank high on Google in DIFFERENT countries. So far here are what we're doing: Keyword research + integrating keywords in content Site optimization (inserting keywords on meta tags) Blog development (10+ times a month with use of keywords) Linkbuilding (Local directory submission, submission on free PR sites, making sure client is listed on their partners' pages) I've always thought developing more content would help the site rank higher. Should we build links for a specific page that has our main keyword so that it would also rank higher? Or building links for the root domain just as good? Your comments and suggestions will surely help! Thanks!
Link Building | | RMTA0 -
Open Site Explorer and comparing links of competitors , then export the differences?
Hi, I'm totally new to this community so please forgive me if this question is a bit dumb.
Link Building | | severtservice
A client of mine is trying to get better rankings for a specific keyword and if we check out the competition we notice that our site has way better and more unique content. The tools here at SEOmoz indicates that the competitor sites have more authority, and so probably more backlinks. With the Open Site Explorer I can quickly see what sites are linking to competitor sites.
And since we're in the same country and trying to rank for the same keywords we also are after the same backlinks. Now there are a few that my client is missing compared to the competitors.
So I would love to get a document that tell us what backlinks we are missing instead of
downloading many reports and do all the checks manually. Is this possible? Thank you,
Dennis0 -
Non www indexed, will this effect rankings?
Hi, I have a domain which has the non www domain indexed. I did start link building using the www in the URL, will this not work as well? So, domain indexed is footballboots.co.uk (fictitious) I start building backlinks using www.footballboots.co.uk. Should I have started building backlinks using footballboots.co.uk for this to work better? Cheers
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Ranking for competitor brand terms
My client sells security software online. Our keyword research shows massive traffic for competitor brands relative to the non-branded terms and my guess is that this traffic converts well. I'd like to figure out a way to get some of that traffic for my client without crossing any ethical boundaries. The only thing I can think of is having a comparison page with good onsite optimization. Does anyone else have any tips on how to rank for these terms?
Link Building | | Riona0