Spam Link Building Discovered - What would you do?
-
Hi Mozers,
After investigating our no 1 competitor we have discovered their 87k back links comparing to ours 1k. After dipper investigations we discovered that all the back links are gained by the websites created by themselves.
So what they did is - they had purchased 10+ domains and created 10+ new websites that are identical as their original .com version. EVERY SINGLE LINK on these 'new' websites link to their .com version. The 'New' websites are not indexed.
Literally each of us can do the same and gain thousands of back links, but isn't it violating google's policy?
What are your thought on it?
(What is the best practice to report the violation of google's policy to Google?)
Best regards,
Lana
-
Thank you for your time Egol. According to Moz our website is outranking my competitor's website in all other metrics other than total external links. Hope we will outrank them on google as well
And thank you Josh and Highland for sharing your thoughts, it was really helpful.
-
I always remind people that Black Hat techniques like this can succeed in the short term but seldom produce the desired result in the long term. Google has a small army of highly paid smart people who want to catch things like this (see Panda, Penguin, etc). When Google does catch this (assuming they haven't already) they will almost certainly face some sort of penalty.
My bet is they're spending the newness of their sites on this technique (a new site has no rank but no penalties either). It probably gives some initial boost until Google catches on with their slower systems (Panda and Penguin are both slow in refreshing). A spam report to Google might draw a manual penalty to the main site but, as Egol said, this is a lot of wasted time and effort on their part.
-
I am more amused than bothered by competitors who do this. Those "manufactured websites" do not have any links into them from other legitimate sites, so they have no link power to pass to the competitor's main site. This activity has zero benefit in my opinion. If these competitors have good rankings, I believe that it must come from other things that they are doing.
I hope that all of my competitors spend at least 50% of their development budgets on this activity. I have no fear of it. In addition to being a waste of their time, I think that doing this can damage their main website's ability to rank.
-
Thank you for the respond Egol,
Right, but original .com version is not deindexed (!?) and that is the issue at the first place. They are manufacturing links and it works for a long time now. Their .com website still ranks high.
As you have said 'Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time' - killing ONE of those pages or sites is not sufficient enough. What about the original page/site which still ranks? Nobody cares for their duplicate websites being deindexed.
Than you have said 'In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.' - well, the one website which ranks is all they need :). If 'sometimes' will be damaged, than it still means that it is OK to manufacture links by duplicating website, and take the risk to 'maybe' become deindexed.
Theoretically every website owner can create duplicate websites and manufacture tons of back links. It makes the white hat link building pointless. If you ask me this is very much violating google's policy and they should be reported. Otherwise, why don't all of us do the same!?
It is irritating to see someone acting spammy getting better rankings...
-
"Manufactured links" on "duplicate websites" have been discounted by Google for at least 15 years. If you build an identical website and link from Identical Page A to Identical Page B, Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time. In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.
If these people were competing against me, I would enjoy seeing them buy a few more domains and put time into tossing up identical sites. No need to report them. Google has deindexed these "New" websites.
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
-
Value of Links? What is each link worth?
Morning Everyone, I just had this thought and wondered what everyone's opinions were in terms of link value in monetary terms. We'll assume for the purposes of this that the links come from contextually relevant sites and that the sites in question have got the Moz DA from being high quality and have a good quality incoming link profile. Its a bit of a theoretical question, but i guess imagine if the only way you could get links was to pay for them, what would they be worth to you. This is link value for SEO purposes, they will have in addition value from traffic from good sites, that no doubt varies wildly depending on topic. I assume everyone also agrees on: The first link from a domain is the most valuable High DA sites are worth more than low ones. So could anyone who has an opinion on the link value suggest a monetary value for links. Its really just using a monetary amount to see how best to target my time. Here is my example of what might be expected, but I am hoping people with more knowledge will perhaps correct it. DA Rating First Link 2nd-5th Link 5th-10th Link 10Plus Links 5 $5 $2 $1 $0 15 $7 $3 $2 $1 25 $25 $10 $5 $2 35 $45 $20 $7 $3 45 $65 $30 $11 $4 55 $95 $45 $19 $5 65 $200 $100 $45 $6 75 $350 $120 $65 $9 85 $700 $240 $95 $15 95 $1100 $450 $200 $30
Link Building | | wellandpower1 -
Good Collaboration resources for link building
We have recently come across this site in our work on a website: https://collabosaurus.com We are wondering if there are any other collaborative tools or sites like this that may be effective for partnering or matching with people for link building purposes. If anyone is aware of anything similar, we'd love to hear about it. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Gavo1 -
India link building - any good ?
Hi Everyone We have clients that have very small budgets. We thought about outsourcing our link building to India to help with costs... Can anyone recommend any good Indian Link building companies that are well priced and that you have seen good results from ?? Any help would be much appreciated Thanks Guys Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
Spam Links sent to my site.
Hello, I'll try to be concise as I can. I run a coupon codes site.
Link Building | | affigroup
Today when I loggein in webmaster tools I noticed many new links to my website. And all to a single page. (mydomain.com/stores/companyname).
I tend to think that spam was made by the person who owns that company because he/she used achors related to his bussiness rather than the company name + coupon or company name + discounts. Besides the fact that these links have no value and created automatically by software there are also links from pornographic websites. (bet he paid someone on fiverr for link building and made my website tier 1) I was thinking of 2 options:
1. I remove that page from my website. (mydomain.com/stores/hiscompany) and use disallow. Not sure I can find all the links poiting to that page.
2. Redirect that page mydomain.com/stores/company to hiscompany.com so he can enjoy his spam. I would appreciate if someone can answer me.1 -
When pitching a whitepaper as Push Content for Link Building, is it ok to give the person I'm pitching a link to a landing page with a form on it?
When pitching a whitepaper as Push Content for Link Building (i.e. pushing out content that my client has created), is it ok to give the person I'm pitching a link to a landing page with a form on it? Or should I create a landing page with the whitepaper included on it? I’m not sure if the client will be ok with this b/c I know they use the whitepaper for sales purposes to gain leads. For example, my pitch email would include a line such as this, "the whitepaper can be found at LINK and I'd love if you could share it with your readers." I think it may be weird/a little wrong to ask a webmaster to include a link on his site to a landing page with a form to get the whitepaper. Does this make sense? What have others done with whitepapers as Push Content for link building?
Link Building | | ArketiGroup1 -
Two link building proposals, which one is better?
Hi there, Our site has a DA of 73, MozRank 5.40, MozTrust 5.88, and over 45,000 external links. We haven't done any offsite SEO before, we got to where we are today organically. We're thinking about hiring a link building firm to help increase our rankings and we've received two proposals. Firm A offered to build us 30 links from DA 50+ sites over 3 months. The anchor text will most likely just be our domain name. Firm B offered to build us 90 links from PR2+ sites over 3 months. They have control over the anchor text. Given our site's profile, which proposal makes more sense for us? Would either of these initiatives move the needle for us? Thanks.
Link Building | | anonp1 -
Link to those that link to you? Worthwhile?
We have thousands and thousands of sites that link to a domain we are working on, many with low page authority and high domain (bloggers, forum posts, etc). Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? I'm not sure what method we would use, maybe some relevant blog comments or social votes. But curious if this could be an effective method.
Link Building | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Create content or more link building?
For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities: -- creating new, original content for your site -- work on getting links to your existing content I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?). Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it. I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content? Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.
Link Building | | scanlin0