Massive Jump In Competitor Domain Authority In 1 year...How?!

[Zersi]

We have noticed a competitor of one of our clients has leapfrogged massively in terms of their Domain Authority, Links, actually pretty much everything in the space of a year. We have been working diligently with our client building up a solid seo strategy based on content and organic link backs, but we're at a loss of how to try and explain the gains by the competitor over them.

I have attached the competitor analysis from April 2012 and Feb 2013 below.

Any help, ideas, conspiracy theories etc. are welcome!

Thanks

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[TomRayner]

Don't be surprised by Google's inability to penalise obvious breaches to its TOS. So many sites slip under the radar.

Case in point, after looking through the top backlinks in OSE and MajesticSEO after you sent me the URL (thank you very much by the way), I think it's clear how they've done it.

There is an absolute ton of links coming from high PA/DA .jp and other Japanese domains pointing to the site.

Furthermore, it looks as though the site may have been hacked at some point, because there's a load of high PA/DA viagra links as well - most of which look deleted now.

Both of these sort of links, while without question unnatural, would pass page and domain authority to the site.  As for why it hasn't been penalised yet? Well, you may be able to see that the linking anchor text to the site is 95% raw URLs (as in: http://www.example.com/).  This means that they would not have triggered any Penguine threshold for over optimised anchor text, leaving it to the algorithm to work out the spam another way, and perhaps it will only be penalised when reviewed manually.

It's an absolute ton of raw URL links coming from high PA/DA, but completely suspicious and irrelevant, websites that has caused the site's authority to sky rocket.

Hope this helps clarify a few things.

[Zersi]

Hi Tom, thanks for the reply. Yes I went through the competitor backlinks to see if there were any spammy type links but there doesn't seem to be, also I'm assuming that at this stage Google would have well penalised them for spammy .edu links with the various updates throughout the last year...

It's definately not quality content, the site is stuck in the late 90's in terms of design and there is absolutely no new content being posted to the site at all...

[TomRayner]

Without knowing the competitor, it's impossible to say how it was done.  Could be a number of things - some legitimate, some not.

All I can do is refer to the Moz document on Domain Authority so you can run through your competitors backlinks and see how that score was increased.  Could just be quality content marketing to the homepage and a number of internal pages, could be something more sinister like .edu blog spamming.