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
-
How do I combat title tag issues in Moz because of long company/site name? [Currently using Yoast SEO Plugin]
I've only just started to dip my toe into the SEO pool, so please forgive me if this is a silly question. I've been working heavily in the Moz tool and the Yoast SEO plugin to clean up the meta descriptions on our site, as there were many pages without descriptions in place (we just transferred from a different CMS to Wordpress within the last month or so). Now I'm noticing on our Site Crawl that we have 60+ pages that have title elements that are considered too long. When I go in to fix these issues on our blog posts (as this is where most of the issues lie), Yoast is already giving me the green light on the title lengths. I've discovered that the reason why Moz is telling us that many of our site lengths are too long is because "| Parker Staffing Services" is added to the end of our title tags automatically. Deep breath Now that you've heard all of the backstory... Is there a way that I can prevent that site title (which is 26 characters all by itself! Talk about limiting!) from displaying on search engines when our blog posts or pages show up in search results? I've poked around in the Titles & Metas settings that come with Yoast, but I fear making too many changes will result in me screwing something up. Help an SEO beginner out? 🙂
Moz Pro | | giaciccone0 -
DA as a measure of link-building success/failure?
Hi all 😃 What would be a good way to track weather a website is doing good or bad in regards to link-building in google's eyes? Is the Domain Authority the best credential? If a website is penalized for link-building schemes, would it reflect on the Domain Authority shown in Moz Analytics? What other Moz score would reflect this scenario? Best regards & Thank you for your help. Carlos
Moz Pro | | 90miLLA0 -
Page Ranking by URL / Keyword
Needing to know how to find out the page rank of a URL that is NOT within the top 50 or top 100. Need to know that specific page's rank, not what our overall site's ranking for the keyword is. Can't seem to find any tool that goes beyond the top 100. Any ideas?
Moz Pro | | leankit0 -
History of first page/top3 rankings
Is there a way to see a graph of the history of these two metrics that are displayed on semoz?
Moz Pro | | santiago230 -
Domain Authoriy/Link Authority - Link Building
At what point do you think that an inbound link becomes a bad or low quality link when it comes to the inbound links page domain Authority and page Authority. SO as they are scored 1-100 in each case. At what score would you attempt to get rid of such links.
Moz Pro | | askshopper0 -
About http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Hello There, I am not able to open http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ on my computer and if i search using on proxy server it is working good... so what i can do for this to run in proper way on my end ? Thanks, Samir
Moz Pro | | samir19800 -
What happened to OSE/Linkscape data?
Can any member of the Moz team or of the community comment on the most recent OCE/linkscape update as of 09/08/2011. It appears that the link data capture for one of our platform is dramatically different than previously and that there are some huge discrepancies? Any update on the change would be appreciated as we use all these updates as benchmarks. Thanks
Moz Pro | | OlivierChateau0 -
LDA vs Farmer/Panda Update
Has anyone re-run the correlation data for webpages' LDA Score since Google's Farmer/Panda update? I still have my writers use the LDA Tool and I am curious to know if there was a significant change in correlation now that "quality content" is touted as a more important ranking factor by Google.
Moz Pro | | costume0