Why does my competitor rank so well with so many paid/traded links?

[Virage]

Greetings everyone!

I've really been enjoying my Moz membership these past few weeks after studying my data and comparing it with my competitors I think it's high time I started asking some questions.

The website I manage has a very good ranking history but over the past year we've seen a slight decline in our SERP positions.  I don't think this has anything to do with on-page optimization but rather with our link profile.  We have only about 10k links total while they have 175k - our mozranks are nearly identical, but his moztrust is 4.46 and our's is 3.51.

I am guessing, on our end, I need to remove some of these low-quality nofollow links (though I'll be honest I have no idea how we obtained them to begin with) but what I don't understand is how our competitor is ranking so well because when I browse their link profile, it is filled with paid link and traded link directories that don't appear to be penalized for what they are.  I was under the impression that this was bad SEO, but now I am thinking I should just play his own game and submit to these sites too.

Looking for any advice or ideas on a better way to compete...

Jennifer

[loopyal]

Visage, those stats seem to say their site is much larger than yours, based on internal links. Your link count from others is small. If some of those are site-wide, then perhaps the number of domains pointing to you is much smaller

How does your domain count compare to theirs?

[Virage]

Thank you so much for the tip Jason!

I will be sure to use the reporting tool more liberally, since you say it actually works!  I've tried it a number of times in the past but I've never quite knew if anyone at google ever actually acted on it or just put it there for our peace of mind

[Virage]

Thank you for your response!

I think your sentiments echo my mentality on the subject.  The last thing I want to do is play our competitor's game because I feel like my website is of a high quality and we've done well so far without using these sorts of link-building practices.

And to clarify, our total links (including internal linking) are 10k, external are only 1.2k (his are 175k total and 4.1k external).

I appreciate the advice on not wasting my time on hunting down to no-follow links.  I'll spend it more wisely finding new high-quality links instead!

[eyepaq]

I understand the frustration and in most of the cases it's the way you are painting it but you are also subjective and also with that amount of links it is very hard to fully understand the link profile of your competitors and yours.

What I think it's important to understand, in general, is that the quality matters over quantity. Maybe 80% of your competitor links are not even consider and there is  a small set of powerful links in his profile that is actually making the difference but again it's hard to really assess the situation.

You can however go his route and hunt his link but if you do so and get low quality links you might end up in the future in a hard corner and start sessions to remove those - especially with Googles crusade on links. You might get some short or even medium term advantage and get heads on with your competitor but dose it pay on a long run ? I think not.

I would rather go for only a few really powerful links, smart ones, to increase your visibility then going fishing with TNT.

As for you going on a crusade to hunt your low quality no follow links, in my opinion, is a waste of time.

Those links by having the no follow won't affect, positively or negatively your link profile and equity in general. The anchor text of those links are indeed taken in consideration by google to understand better your website, product and brand but you will need to balance very wise (if those anchor text are bad) if it's going to help you hunting them down. ( to be honest I think even if the anchors are bad it dosen't make sense to waste time on them).

Just a thought .. or several

Hope it helps.

[JFritton]

Hi Jennifer,

I know I might catch some flak for even talking about this, but I have to keep a close watch on our competitors because they are constantly rocketing up in the SERPs from paid/spam links.  For some reason it seems to take Google a while to catch them even with the new Penguin update.

I have no problems with using tricks of the trade to get advantageous results in rankings, but it irritates me to get outranked by competitors who are blatantly just buying thousands of junk links.

In each situation I use OSE to get several examples and then use:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport  to report them.  It seems to take a week or so but each time I've reported I've seen the spammers URL tank about 50 positions.

In many situations however Google will just remove value from the junk links without penalty and you can still lose your position to the competitor if overall they have more good links than you do.  Also take into consideration your onsite SEO, content quality and social signals.

Best of luck,

Jason