Competitors black-hat link building?

[ChimplyWebGroup]

Hi Mozzers,

<a>http://www.alivenetwork.com/ </a>is a close competitor of ours. They're ranking far better than us even though many of our search metrics are the same...except one! links!

To give you an idea, we've got a fairly large backlink profile for the industry with quality links.
34,981 links from 276 Root Domains = about 127 links/domain.

Alive Network has 1,692,256 links from 705 root domains = about 2400 links/domain.

Surely that looks a bit black-hat right there? Is it just a matter of time until they're penalised? Perhaps they're just a bunch of domain-wide links? Thoughts would be appreciated.

[Bryan_Loconto]

You've made some great points here David!

I agree there is no way they built those links last month, that's for sure! And by no means did I mean to imply that waiting around for Google is only course of action. Just figured I'd share the link. It certainly can't hurt!

I like the point you made about risk tolerance. Risk vs Reward is all around us in business. I just feel that it could become a slippery slope in regards to following what we know is not best practices regarding website optimization.

Cheers!!

[Kingof5]

You may be waiting quite a while if you think Google will take care of this on its own. I guarantee they didn't build all those links in the last month, and what just came out 1 month ago? A Penguin refresh. And if they're still outranking you, it probably didn't hurt them.

Why don't you try the same tactics they're using? Obviously you should be more discreet about it, but it's clearly working for them and could work for you as well. Don't get stuck in that false mindset of white hat vs. black hat, there is no such thing. There are only levels of risk tolerance, just like in a million other aspects of business. Decide how much risk you're willing to take then build links appropriately.

[Shakur]

If it is like that, google will catch them and drop them far away from the ranking.

I recommend you to do this:

Google your most important keywords.
Grab all the top 10 pages in the ranking.
Check the balance of the traffic using semrush.com, if you can see any big drop from traffic could be they have been penalised. In this case avoid them. If they have normal balance, go to https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ and check their backlinks.
Download your csv report.
Now choose the most important ones (with DA &PA) and try to replicate them.
Remind has to look natural, so you must go slowly.

This way you dont have to wait the results of the first site.

Good luck.

[ChimplyWebGroup]

OSE is telling me there are 1,200 links that are almost exclusively directory submissions. I imagine we'll see them drop out fairly soon?

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hmm... I feel like this scenario is all too familiar.

Have you tried reporting their site to Google? If not, I'd recommend doing so. This "may" prompt a manual review of their site and get them out of your way! Best of luck on this!!

#TEAMNOSPAM

[Shakur]

They have grown a lot since October. Can be seen from the growth curve. It seems that some tactics are wearing, if they have cheated we will see in a few months. Otherwise you could use opensiteexplorer.org to copy their strategy and replicate their backlinks.

[Chris661]

Except that the bad links may have been disavowed in their GWMT.

[ChimplyWebGroup]

They look like a bunch of directory links really...I'd be extremely surprised if it was possible for them to naturally build these links, they're a small-medium company.

Let's just wait and see to watch them drop out of the rankings then!

[TheZenAgency]

Hi

Have you analysed their link profile to see if it is indeed suspicious looking websites linking to it? Open site explorer is perfect for this.

If it is links which Google would consider bad it will only be a matter of time before they are caught. No one can beat the algorithms!

Regards