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
-
What is the best way to add a noindex./nofollow meta tags to tags in a blog?
Could anyone tell me the best way to add noindex./nofollow meta tags as I have around 12 duplicate tags in a blog. I have the Yoast SEO plugin - unpaid version.
Moz Pro | | SEM_at_Lees0 -
Competitor outranking us despite all SEO metrics in our favour
Hi, We are trying to outrank a competitor of ours on Google for around 100 terms that we are both clearly targetting. Our competitor currently 'wins' in the SERPS around 70% of the time, often ranking in the top 3 positions. The problem is, we are absolutely convinced that all onsite and offsite SEO metrics we are monitoring would suggest that our content should almost always place higher than theirs. Here is what I know: All pages on both websites are rated 'A' by the Moz on-page-grader tool for the phrases we are targetting, with virtually no tech issues to be addressed on either site Our domain authority is 10 points higher than theirs Neither of us have external links to the relevant pages on our sites (although we are working on some for ours) Our Page Authority is considerably higher on average - often by 10 points or more We have considerably more linking route domains, from better sites. Also many more total external links The HTML title and H1 headings of our pages contain the target phrases at the beginning - our competitors are the same. Although they often ONLY include the target phrases in their title, wheras in our title they might only take up 1/3 of the total characters We have images optimised for the target phrases on our pages. As do they. We use the target phrases roughly the same number of times in our copy text, as do they I have totally run out of ideas now for further optimising our site/pages to consistently rank better for these target phrases, although maybe these are a couple of factors that could be having an impact on the rankings: The structure of their website is perhaps optimised more for these target phrases - our site is much bigger, so perhaps our 100 pages are given less relevance on our site than their 100 pages? - but surely our stronger page authority would suggest otherwise? Perhaps Google is using page engagement statistics to determine that their site is 'betteer' than ours in terms of user appeal and engagment? Can anyone think of something that I might have missed? Is there another major ranking factor I have perhaps neglected in my research? I know link building strategies are a good way to approach this in the long run, but we are currently just concerned about why we are not already ranking better when clearly they are not undertaking any link building strategies of their own. Any help or pointers here would be enormously appreciated. Thanks Lou
Moz Pro | | OBG0 -
Aren't domain.com/page and domain.com/page/ the same thing?
Hi All, A recent Moz scan has turned up quite a few duplicate content notifications, all of which have the same issue. For instance: domain.com/page and domain.com/page/ are listed as duplicates, but I was under the impression that these pages would, in fact, be the same page. Is this even something to bother fixing or a fluke scan? If I should fix it does anyone know of an .htaccess modification that might be used? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | G2W0 -
Keywords rankings compared competitors not working
Hello, My keywords rankings compared competitors is not working : http://screencast.com/t/x88Z6tXB2r For months I've never have any stats in the competitors columns, why ? Thank you
Moz Pro | | JeanlouisSEO0 -
Domain / Page Authority - logarithmic
SEOmoz says their Domain / Page Authority is logarithmic, meaning that lower rankings are easier to get, higher rankings harder to get. Makes sense. But does anyone know what logarithmic equation they use? I'm using the domain and page authority as one metric in amongst other metrics in my keyword analysis. I can't have some metrics linear, others exponential and the SEOmoz one logarithmic.
Moz Pro | | eatyourveggies0 -
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 -
Http://lsapi.seomoz.com pop up
I am getting this pop up on every page I visit: A username and password are being requested by http://lsapi.seomoz.com. The site says: "SEOmoz" I've searched some forums and see that others are experiencing it as well. The advice was to log into my seomoz account, however that did not work...any ideas?
Moz Pro | | texmeix0 -
How are our competitors getting these inbound linking domains?
I'm currently managing SEO for my company's website, and I'm getting into link building for the first time. As part of the process, I'm using Open Site Explorer to see who's linking into our competitor sites, to get a better sense of what's available to us in our particular avenue of e-commerce. However, I'm finding that our competitors are getting inbound links from high-authority sites pretty far afield from selling jewelry - census.gov, parallels.com, warnerbros.com, and others. I try clicking through to these links, but each link starts a download of a file. I've seen .f4v, .7z, and .apk files listed as inbound links to our competitor. How is this happening? Again, I'm new to link building, so there may be a simple answer here, and if so I apologize for asking. However, this seems really strange to me, and a difficult situation to confront.
Moz Pro | | jozaksut0