Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
-
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so.
How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total.
As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords.
I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this?
Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful.
I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
-
I am seeing it with providers of local SEO services - either having over 10 "resource" pages with links to totally unrelated sites or linking each letter in the word "Copyright" to a resource link page. These are clearly link manipulation schemes - why is it that Google hasn't penalized more of these sites? And SEO providers are still selling and profiting from these services. Disgusting.
-
Chris, that's true. Most of these blackhat techniques work temporarily but that doesn't seem to pose an issue since the blackhatters can put together a new site within hours. Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in joining them. I'm just trying to figure out how can a whitehatter ever succeed in a market that's filled with blackhat techniques.
-
Well Howard, it's very true that there are many blackhat techniques that work. The reason they're called blackhat is that they go against search engine guidelines and thus are risky, short-term strategies. People aren't going to be arrested and thrown in jail for using them (typically) so everyone does have an opportunity to join in that fray. If you're not up for techniques that may leave you high and dry when you wake up tomorrow morning, or that don't add long term value to a commercial domain, it may just be enough satisfaction for you to know that people employing techniques like those you're describing are often the ones screaming the loudest in forums about how they got scerwed by Google and how much money they lost when Google updates their algorithm.
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
-
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sir0 -
href="#" and href="javascript.void()" links. Is there a difference SEO wise?
I am currently working a site re-design and we are looking at if href="#" and href="javascript.void()" have an impact on the site? We were initially looking at getting the links per page down but I am thinking that rel=nofollow is the best method for this. Anyone had any experience with this? Thanks in advanced
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clickermediainc0 -
Disavow - Broken links
I have a client who dealt with an SEO that created not great links for their site. http://www.golfamigos.co.uk/ When I drilled down in opensiteexplorer there are quite a few links where the sites do not exist anymore - so I thought I could test out Disavow out on them .. maybe just about 6 - then we are building good quality links to try and tackle this problem with a more positive approach. I just wondered what the consensus was?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
Does posting on Craigslist damage our SEO or reuptation?
We have a website that's a single person barbershop. She has been promoting on Craigslist, and that is outranking the website in the SERPs. However, the craigslist results showing up are actually expired and don't link to anything. They just seem to be cached by Craigslist. My question is, is Craigslist considered to generally not be a good avenue for directing inbound links for services on your site? Or is it a good strategy to use Craigslist to build link traffic for service businesses? I get mixed responses when I search for this. Thanks eYtdHtg.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smallpotatoes0 -
Rollover design & SEO
After reading this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/designing-for-seo some questions came up from my developers. In the article it says "One potential solution to this problem is a mouse-over. Initially when viewed, the panel will look as it does on the left hand side (exactly as the designer want it), yet when a user rolls over the image the panel changes into what you see on the right hand side (exactly what the SEO wants)." My developers say" Having text in the rollovers is almost like hiding text and everyone knows in SEO that you should never hide text. "In the article he explains that it is not hidden text since its visible & readable by the engines.What are everyone's thoughts on this? Completely acceptable or iffy?Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Can a Page Title be all UPPER CASE?
My clients wants to use UPPER CASE for all his page titles. Is this okay? Does Google react badly to this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petewinter0