Our main competitor is/was doing some Black Hat tactics....
-
Our main competitor Royal Cases, a custom case manufacturer and designer, has some really shady links and some dummy domains with duplicate content, yet they are ranking #1 organically for some of the industry's top search terms. Let me give you some examples.
First off, they have multiple dummy domains with the same exact same content as their main website. One of these is casescasescases.net. They have a couple more that are just as bad.
Secondly, their link profile is so shockingly black hat, I can't figure out why/how they haven't been deindexed or hit with a filter. I'll give you some examples. I ran a link analysis through Moz, and found multiple links from many websites that have absolutely NOTHING to do with custom cases. Here are a few of the linking domains: http://moneysourceonline.com/ ; www.lemons2lemonade.com/ ; http://jenaesboutique.com/ ; These are just a few. Now here is what I don't understand, when I go to explore the individual inbound links, I can't find the links to Royal anywhere on the pages. They have dozens from different pages on these obviously completely unrelated websites, but when you go to those pages, the links themselves are nowhere to be found. Yet, they are showing up as inbound links....I am lost.
Does anyone have any idea what in the world is going on here? Is there a way to report this to Google? Normally I wouldn't resort to this sort of "tattle-tailing" but this company has a history of scheming and just horrendous business practices, and they recently had to pay a large settlement for pirating software for their company.
-
Karma will Kome
-
We don't necessarily know what Google is "rewarding" them for. Organic rankings are sometimes not fair, but we just need to work at what believe will benefit us in the long-term. It's frustrating, labor-intensive and difficult. However, that is why it is also rewarding.
I see where Chris is coming from though, in the respect that (I believe) in focusing attention on creating sites with value as opposed to spending efforts elsewhere (he knows his stuff).
Good luck!
-
Now is there anything that can be done to report webmasters engaging in black hat seo? Would you guys even report it? Has anyone had any success reporting webspam to Google?
-
um–hum
-
??? I am confused by your response. I am not building links to my competitor, I am simply trying to figure out why Google has all of these golden rules of what not to do, but yet rewards the websites that use those black hat tactics with high organic rankings. I assure you, I take my job very seriously and I work very hard to make sure I am doing things the right way to get my business ahead of the competition. I reached out to the community of Moz for some insights, you don't need to be so condescending.
-
Further proof that black hat tactics work and work well. And they always will work. Google still can't really determine the quality of a link, whether it's natural, negative SEO, spam, etc.
-
So scheming and poor business practices makes your resorting to "tattle tailing" OK? I don't follow that logic. You're probably better off working on building new relationships for your own site than building links to your competitor.
-
"First off, they have multiple dummy domains with the same exact same content as their main website".
One of my competitors has been doing this exact thing and have been rewarded by ranking well in Google. I don't even think reporting web spam to Google even works. I can't understand how they haven't been deindexed or penalized for this.
-
Hahah I found that amusing as well. I guess they are just ranking because of their age...I just dont see why they are so high up with such a crappy website, bogus links, and so much duplicate content.
-
Am I the only one here that finds it hilarious that bsa.org gives companies that pirate software a followed link? Oh man, that is rich. The giggles keep coming.
It's an expensive link, but maybe your company should turn itself in for piracy?
They're only shooting themselves in the foot with the duplicate content.
The site's link profile doesn't look 'shockingly' black hat, though there are some shady spots. It looks like a lot of the newer links were made because the site was scraped. I've found quite a few, at random, that redirect to some Chinese ccTLD. That might be one of the reasons you can't find the link.
Besides, even crap links can possibly prop up a domain for a little while. (Not recommended) But a site may eventually get hit, or it will drop a bit after new low quality links ebb.
Maybe you just don't have the domain age... there's a bunch of things.
-
The links may have just been removed. Also, there rankings may/may not been influence by these tactics (they been around since 1998). As you know, many factors matter in organic ranking. You can make a report of webspam at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.
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
-
Canonical URLs all show trailing slash on main site pages - using Yoast SEO for Wordpress - how to correct
We are using Yoast for a number of our sites. We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash: Example: http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/ Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons. Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress. Sorry for my ignorance. Thanks for any help.
Moz Pro | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing1 -
Update in Moz spider/tools?? Flagging duplicate content / ignoring canonical
Hi all, Has there been an update in the SEOmoz crawling software? We now have thousands of dupe content/page title warnings for paginated product page URLs that have correctly formatted canonicals. e.g. http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx ... has following pages with identical content that have been flagged: http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=6 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 ..plus 4 more URL's. But they all have canonical set. There's even a notice at the bottom of report that tells us there's a canonical set to http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx What gives, SEOmoz ?? Thanks Michael
Moz Pro | | LawrenceNeal0 -
Last Linkscape index update: 05/30/2012
When will the next Linkscape index update occur? I've been waiting to run our backlink profile numbers, but the Last Linkscape index update was 05/30/2012? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | larahill0 -
I need a tool/tools to extract keywords from say 50 sites in one niche and then check the rank tor those sites
This is for telemarketing of seo services I want to have some insight into an industry before I call them could this be done with the adwords keyword tool api and then exported to excel. It would also be nice to have data on backlinks say from seo moz opensite explorer.. Its just that the research you do before you even call a potential client is so time consuming and you can never really check to see how they are ranking for there main keywords manually. We are trying to automate as much of this initial research as possible... Any Idea's Thanks
Moz Pro | | duncan2740 -
Track keywords of our competitor
Is there a way for us to track the keywords of our competitor and so we can use that to optimize our sites?
Moz Pro | | shebinhassan1 -
Ultimate Ranking Tool integrating Analytics / Adwords / Google WM Tools
I currently use SEOMOZ Campaigns and Advanced Web Ranking for monitoring our KW rankings and those of competition. AWR is a brilliant tool with so many different reports, methods of viewing etc. SEOMOZ campaigns are good but don't come close to the monitoring power of AWR (EG I monitor over 50 competitors on over 1000 KW's on a Daily basis with AWR and recieve a variety of set emailed reports on the data). However, one thing that SEOMOZ campaigns have that is useful is the traffic data - but this is still a bit basic and I think could be improved. The problem with AWR is that it doesn't integrate with your Analytics / Adwords / Google WM Tools - so it is only showing you half the picture. Knowing how your site ranks for each keyword is helpful, but it would be nice to understand the value of each keyword. For example, being able to see your rank position and how much traffic that keyword has sent you over time would be helpful. It would also be nice to see the number of searches that are performed for that keyword each month . For example, lets say I saw that I was ranking at number 11 for “hover mower” and getting 500 hits per month. Two months from now, if I was ranking at position 7, it would be nice to be able to immediately see how that changed the amount of traffic I was receiving for the term. Is a position of 11 (first item on page two) better than position 10 (last item on page one)? If you can link it to your analytics, you could then link it to your goals, and goal values to get a complete picture of where your keywords rank the value of the rank, and the improvment on that value when rank changes. If browsed around for such software but can't find anything like this - does anyone know of any software that can do this - or something close to this? Many thanks
Moz Pro | | James770 -
How to handle crawl diagnostic errors for the same url. /products & /products/
I have copied on of the errors out of the crawl diagnostics report. Both /products and /products/ are returning an error, and both have pretty good domain authority so I feel like its hurting my site that these show up this way. Both urls create the same page, should I just setup a 301 on the /products with no slash or will that cause more harm... I am using the MODx cms system and that could have something to do with it. | Products | Datalight http://www.datalight.com/products 1 37 5 Products | Datalight http://www.datalight.com/products/ | 1 | 30 | 1 |
Moz Pro | | tjsherrill0