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
-
Duplicate Content: Marketing Page / Content Page
So I am getting duplicate content warnings on my website for my pages white paper and webinar video pages. Each white paper / webinar video page is behind a marketing form page that must be filled out. I am getting a lot of warnings that the marketing page and the content page are being picked up as duplicated content. In the past, both the marketing page and the content page were given the same title and url, the body content is not similar. My question: Is the URL / Title similarity enough to set off the duplicate content warnings and would changing one or the other solve the issue?
Moz Pro | | AllMedSeo0 -
Canonicalisation/ Moz/ WP.
Hi, I've recently put a new site live using Wordpress, and have hooked it up to Moz Analytics. Moz is reporting >1000 pages with 'missing meta description page', and >250 with 'duplicate page content'. The issues seem to be being flagged by pages with '?sort=asc&view=main', ?show=paged&view=main, '?sort=ratedup&show=all&view=list', etc. I have a number of category pages, which users can filter by etc to give them the information in the way they want to see it. I have this ' I haven't got many pages indexed by Google yet, so can't see if they're hitting the same issues as Moz. Any help/ advice appreciated.
Moz Pro | | newstd1000 -
Massive Rank Changes in Bing/Yahoo Only - What's up w/ Rank Tracker?
I'll be honest, it's pretty shameful how little attention I give Bing and Yahoo. But something recently caught my eye - I have a client who according to rank tracker is all over the place in yahoo/bing...up 20 positions for some kw's, down 12 for others...meanwhile Google's holding steady, and Google data seems mostly accurate - with one exception of showing 46th position for an exact match branded search that they're #1 for. I know Rank Tracker has been going through some fine tuning, right? I don't manually check Yahoo/Bing - I can't imagine those #'s are accurate though. Am I right to assume it's incorrect data? Just curious, any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks
Moz Pro | | SVmedia0 -
Estimating the number of LRD I need to outrank competitor
I just ran a SERP/keyword diffculty report for a keyword I want one of my pages to rank Also, I just conducted the on-the-page-optimization and now I am going to start buidling links. => I would like to estimate how many linking root domains I need to overrank one of my competitor. These are the MOZ data:
Moz Pro | | He_Jo
1. My page:
Page Linking Root domains: 0
Root Domain Linking Root Domains: 151 2. Competitor:
Page linking root domains: 1
Root Domain Linking Root Domains: 5,786 I don't really know on which metric (Page or domain LRD) to rely on in order to make an estimation and I would be glad for some help! To simplyfy the problem, assume that all toher factors (code, on-the-page keyword use., social etc.) are equal for both sites. Can I just get 2LRD to that page in order to likely outrank my competitor or do I need around 5000 more links poiting to my site? I think an answer to this question could help a lot of users here, since I saw similar questions/difficulties regarding the use of page LRD vs. root domain LRD P.S. Non of the pages of my website do currently rank in the top 100 for that keyword.2 -
DA/PA against PR
Hi, Very quick question. If the DA/PA of a website is 70/80+ I would assume the PR would be 5+. I have come across this DA/PA 70/80+ and PR 2. First is the DA/PA not connected in anyway to PR from the metrics they take into account? Secondly which one would you go for if you had to choose one: 1. DA/PA 60+ and PR 2 2. DA/PA 30+ and PR 4 Thanks
Moz Pro | | activitysuper0 -
How to recover from penguin hit for my site http://rndegrees.net
My site http://rndegrees.net hit by penguin and after that I worked on cloud tag and one duplicate page content which was present on my site, also I worked on back links though my site hasn't recovered yet. Please guide me if I missed on something to recover from penguin hit.
Moz Pro | | HQP0 -
Report notification emails (SEOmoz PRO Application ) --- Is it possible to customise the sender email address and/or email signature
The ranking reports are great but is there any way of changing the sender email address to be our own, and have our signature appearing at the bottom of the email notifications? We'd really like to send them direct to our customers and save some time double handling.
Moz Pro | | Fatpublisher0 -
Anyone know how/where to get keyword yield ratio?
I'm trying to incorporate keyword yield ratio (the ratio of keywords to pages yielding search traffic) in my seo report. I want to be able to compare on a monthly basis the percentage ratio of keywords to a landing page yielding search traffic. So for example, in July we might have 5 keywords that earned a click to landing page A. But in September, the number of keywords grew to 8 keywords that earned a click to landing A. I would like to be able to report monthly on the % ratio growth of number of keywords to landing pages that yield search traffic. Aim is to grow # of keywords per page... Is there a way I can get this data through seomoz tools or google analytics? Thanks, Gemma
Moz Pro | | RBA0