Seo black hat tricks

[jamesjd71]

I have a competitor in the local area.  He registered a new domain name.  www.orangecountypatentlawfirm.com.  It was created back in 11/10 and updated a few months ago on 11/13.

My domain is ocpatentlawyer.com.  I put my domain and his domain in the open site explorer. The peculiar thing is that my competitors website mirrors identically to my domain.  (see attached image)

my competitors website rose through the SERP very fast.  I never saw it coming.  Anyways, I wanted to know if he was using some type of black hat seo trick to hi jack my domain authority to get his own website to rank higher?

Plus, if so, does it hurt my ranking?

compare.png

[Asjad]

Hello,

Let's try to compare you with your competitor

http://ocpatentlawyer.com/

• Hundreds of indexed pages. Have a blog. That's a good sign
• Meta Tags are not optimized at all i.e Title Tags, Meta Description. That is absolutely essential
• Content quality is good but not optimized with keywords
• Around 1000 Back-links with Non Money Anchors. This is really encouraging
• Social Sharing is on but need to boast to significant level

http://www.jafaripatentlaw.com/

• Optimized Meta Tags. Really Nice!
• More Than 300 Indexed Pages. A blog as well. Very Nice!
• Content Optimized with keywords
• Around 1600 Back-links

Remarks

• I am really happy with current position of your website. With proper On Page and few more quality back-links (In Compliance with Best Practices) could turn things significantly in few months
• Social Sharing need a push
• Keep on blogging. You are doing really a nice job.

I hope, this will help!

Regards

[FedeEinhorn]

I'm sorry James, but I don't provide SEO services for the moment.

There a list of recommended SEO companies suggested by Moz: http://moz.com/article/recommended

As for the Metrics, if you go to opensiteexplorer and type the URL of your competitor, you won't get any data, as it is actually a new site and with almost no authority.

I did check the backlinks using ahrefs and they have near 75. My quick guess is, that if they are climbing out of nowhere, received 75 backlinks in a few days, then they are most likely using some king of black hat seo technique. But you shouldn't care, they WILL be removed in a few days (it could take a couple month too. You can report them to Google as a spam report).

Anyway, leaving that site aside, there are issues in your site that you should fix ASAP, or you will never get a decent amount of Search traffic. As I mentioned before, you can't name your pages "HOME". You need to name them properly. Check other Websites for reference... Your title, in the homepage, should read something like: "OC PAtent Lawyer - Entrepreneur and Mid-Size Business Patent Attorney". Plus your description should state what you do, while now, it also says "home".

Send me PM if you need more info. I can probably help you out for free. It is a Wordpress theme, so it shouldn't be so hard to fix.

[GaryVictory]

Yes you have two of the same domains listed here, but I assumed you noticed this James.

Gary

[GaryVictory]

A highly debated topic. Domains with many key words, plus location key word stuffing have seen many sites penalised.  Much comes down to the keywords used within a domain to see if you have been penalised or not by Google. You would really need to look assess all algorithms to eliminate any doubt.

All specialists will tell you it's best to build a Brand site on a keyword domain so you get both brand mentions and generic intent keywords.

Moz is just one very good tool to use to assess the health of a website. A good marketing company will use various tools to check out any problems. Never stick to one. My advice - have an expert assess everything before coming to with a strategy to improve you website performance.

Hope this helps James.

Good luck

Gary

[jamesjd71]

If you make a list and the impact it makes then I will pay you to do it. Please provide quote.

[jamesjd71]

I did it twice and same result. I didn't type it in. I cut and paste. it isn't a data entry error.

[FedeEinhorn]

James,

There's no such thing as "hijacking your authority".

You mistakenly typed twice your own domain, so you are seeing the same results in both columns

PS: There are a few things in your SEO that you have overlooked. Just by accessing your site I noticed the first: Title = "Home". You should really consider hiring an SEO expert to help you with your site.