Has anyone seen a spammy competitors website hit by the Google changes?
-
I wonder, after all the talk of Penguins and Pandas if anyone has seen evidence of a competitor who you know has 1000's of spammy links removed from their page one position in Google.
I have a trade competitor who appeared from nowhere about 12 months ago with 11,000+ back-links most of which were totally unrelated to our trade and appear to be link-farm links for the most part.
After reading about Google's changes I thought the site might be hit but it remains up there in the first 2 or 3 results on page one.
I wonder if anyone has seen similar sites penalised?
Colin
-
I hear ya, Colin. Drives me nuts every time I see spammers up there.
-
Good luck - you can close a ticket by clicking on Good Answer
-
Thanks Ian, Irving and Ian,
I take your point about controlling what I can control and your right.
Just frustrating to watch after following Googles recommendations. But, as you say, there might be other factors.
Thanks guys.
Off now to kick the cat!
(Just joking).
Colin
-
We've seen a competitor that has used spammy practices for years that no matter what continues to sit at the top of the rankings.
As Ian said, it's maddening as can be but you can't fix Google so you just have to work on improving your own site. (Still working on taking this advice)
-
We have seen several competitors get trashed in the rankings. Spammy links does not guarantee that a site will be penalized. They may enough good quality links to counteract their spam links and there are probably several other factors taken into consideration in the Google spam penalty algorithm.
-
I've seen plenty, but I only remember the ones that keep their rankings
In all seriousness: I know it's hard, but you have to ignore competitors as far as spammy practices go. Google's far from perfect in detecting spam, even now, and their ability to rank may come from other factors. Even if it doesn't, you don't control that. It's frustrating as hell - believe me, I get it. But focus on what you do control: Your site.
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
-
Temporary Domain Changes
Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi0 -
How to improve or fix my website ? for an unknown reason bad ranks on Google
Hello, I know that I need to have good quality backlinks, and I am getting backlinks sometime more sometime less. but that is not a problem at this moment i belive. So I am asking someone who can help me and check my website MajorDroid and tells me how can I improve or fix my problem if there is a problem. Because I am very sad when I see this for example: if you search for keyword: oukitel k3 review my website is at page 3, but at same time on page 1 there are only three relevant results, and all other results on page 1 are only partial like OUKITEL K3 Specs Confirmed.... and they are not relevant for users... because they are looking for review. I have the same problem with other keywords also where my page is on second page or third page of Google... and again some other websites with only partial keyword are on first page.... and google claims to offer relevant info for users... now i do not know how google looks my website, or where is the problem ? why quite often my website ranks on second page or third page although competition is not great, and google shows only several relevant results on first page... for example this is review for oukitel k3 I hope you can help me Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zgb0 -
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Google Plus Authorship
Situation Description: I have a website called Website A. I wish to migrate alot of the content from Website A to Website B. Website B will be on a completely different domain name and environment. Authors of Website A will act as contributing authors for Website B. It is also possible that other contributing authors of other websites C and D commit to writing content on Website B. Questions (1) Does it make sense to create a google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com and link from content on websiteB to their google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com? (2) Does AuthorRank affect PageRank? If yes, if I take the above approach would websiteA be effected or websiteB since the content writers of websiteA are contributing to websiteB? (3) Is it ok for userA to have a corporate google plus profile assuming he might also have another google plus profile under a different address? I always think it make sense that there exists a google plus profile at an employee level and another google plus profile at a personal level. (4) If an employee leaves the company, do I leave his/hers Google Plus profile alive? The fact that no more content would be published under that particular profile, would that negatively effect author rank over time? (5) Another interesting observation is that UsaToday, CNN etc do not use authorship? No authors link to their twitter profile or google plus profile. Shouln't they be doing this in terms of author rank or is author rank not that important? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo12120 -
Change of language
Hi everyone, We bought a domain which had content in German for over 8 years. So the rankings it had were in another search engine aswell. So i've changed the language of the content + targetting in webmaster tools to Dutch. (i've created unique content, in case your wondering)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online_Supply
Now we don't rank in the targetted search engine, nor in the search engine the website was previously ranked. My question is how can we fix this so we are going to get indexed and ranked for the targetted search engine. Thanks in advance.0 -
Ecommerce website consolidation
I have a large ecommerce site and several smaller nitche ecommerce sites. All have the same products, but the smaller sites are loosing traffic. I want to combine all the sites to the larger site so it will be easier to manage, but I don't want to loose any rank on the smaller sites. Example: www.yourpromopeople.com - This is the large site I want to use. www.logocoolies.com www.fourcolormagnets.com - These are a couple of the smaller sites I want to combine with the larger one. Questions: What are the pros and cons in doing this? What would be the best way to do this? Would redirecting the URL's to the larger site's product pages do the trick or is there a better option? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
Should I change Permalinks?
I have a site that is doing well in rankings, and its also been accepted in to Google news. I have around 800 article live on the site. My current permalink structure is - /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ What I am wondering, would it be better to change it to - /%postname%/ The reason I ask is that most of the well ranking sites and sites built by SEO companies all seem to have the /%postname%/ Will I get a benefit from changing this? I know that I could republish content have the /%postname%/ permalinks. Are there any other benefits? If the is a benefit, I'd perefr to change it as soon as possible before the site grows even more Thanks in advance for anyone who can help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Google Places / Google Analytics
I apologize first if this comes across as extremely novice, but I realized I really didn't know the answer and so - here I am. 🙂 Is anyone familiar with tracking google place traffic in google analytics? Is it possible? I'd love to know how many of our visitors are coming from our google place listings (we have several locations throughout the state.) Much gratitude in advance ~ Alicia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aaronetics0