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.
How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
-
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry.
They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors.
It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
-
Kevin, can you give us any type of update as to how this turned out? Did the rankings drop back after a bit, or are they still there? Did you figure out if they were using any shady tactics?
-
There are a lot of analysis you need to do to find out whether a person is doing BH on their site (just like NY Times hiring a SEO company to research on JC Penny) as there are a lot of plays you can play around with to try and trick Google.
Just some examples:
Onsite
- Are they stuffing keywords?
- Are they using doorway pages?
Offpage
- Are they buying links?(Most common)
- Are they spamming blog comments?
At the end of the day, if you find out that they are actually using BH method, you can report them from Google Webmaster Tools, make sure you put in all your evidence as they would not spend the time analyising each request.
-
Hi Kevin,
It is really hard to assume that a website is using BH unless I am able to check them myself, but for starters (which I believe you already did) you can always check the FF: PR, Links (inbound & outbound) use yahoo for this, use the tools in SEOmoz for this too to determine the quality of links.
You see it could also mean that those websites are of diff. IP's and each site is linking to authority domains, needless to say but you also have to check your website if it is really optimized and the duration thereof for its caching.
Now this is a handful but I am excited as to the outcome of this.
Cheers!
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
-
Is domain redirection a good method for SEO?
I have a question and need suggestion from you guys. I’ve searched for my question on Google but don’t get exact information what I need. Maybe I can’t search perfectly.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kamishah
Let me explain my confusion:
I’ve checked backlink profile of a website. He is not using his main domain while doing comment backlink. He put his another domain while doing comment backlink. The another domain redirect to the main domain. Why he use another domain while doing comment backlink?
Is it helpful to get better rank on Google? For example: My Main Domain = solutionfall.com
Another Domain= xyz.com (It redirect to solutionfall.com)
He just uses xyz.com while doing comment backlink. Thank You so much1 -
Does Google and Other Search Engine crawl meta tags if we call it using react .js ?
We have a site which is having only one url and all other pages are its components. not different pages. Whichever pages we click it will open show that with react .js . Meta title and meta description also will change accordingly. Will it be good or bad for SEO for using this "react .js" ? Website: http://www.mantistechnologies.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA0 -
How to find Spam Website?
Hi guys, I'm seo newbie and really want to find websites that hurt seo ranking to avoid get link. Which tools or trick can help me to find those site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | denakalami0 -
Can a Self-Hosted Ping Tool Hurt Your IP?
Confusing title I know, but let me explain. We are in the middle of programming a lot of SEO "action" tools for our site. These will be available for users to help better optimize their sites in SERPs. We were thinking about adding a "Ping" tool based in PHP so users can ping their domain and hopefully get some extra attention/speed up indexing of updates. This would be hosted on a subdomain of our site. My question is: If we get enough users using the product, could that potentially get us blacklisted with Google, Bing etc? Technically it needs to send out the Ping request, and that would be coming from the same IP address that our main site is hosted on. If we end up getting over a 1000 users all trying to send ping requests I don't want to potentially jeopardize our IP. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley0 -
I have a recipe food blog and use wordpress, but my recipes are usually in more than one category...?
The recipes are in most cases in more than one category (usually two) each. Do and (and if so how) need to set each post to one canicol url? E.g A recipe on Peas is in healthy foods (which is the default wordpress cat.) and also Vegetarian Dishes. I use YOAST for wordpress
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kelly33300 -
A site is using their competitors names in their Meta Keywords and Descriptions
I can't imagine this is a White Hat SEO technique, but they don't seem to be punished for it by Google - yet. How does Google treat the use of your competitors names in your meta keywords/descriptions? Is it a good idea?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterConnor0 -
Why do websites use different URLS for mobile and desktop
Although Google and Bing have recommended that the same URL be used for serving desktop and mobile websites, portals like airbnb are using different URLS to serve mobile and web users. Does anyone know why this is being done even though it is not GOOD for SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | razasaeed0 -
Finding and Removing bad backlinks
Ok here goes. Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder. 1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile. 2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it? 3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links? 4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing? My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed? I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake. Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | k9byron0