Creating multiple domains with key phrases and linking back and forth to them
-
There are several of my competitors who have built multiple sites with keywords in their domain names such as localaustinplumber.com, houstonplumbers.com, Dallasplumbers.com, localdallasplumbingservices.com...you get the picture. (These are just made up examples to illustrate what they are doing) They put unique content on each page and use alias whois using a different credit card to set up each domain to hide the fact from Google that they are the same entity and then link back and forth to each of the domains with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. They are outranking me on a lot of key search phrases due to the fact that they have the keywords in the domain name. They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Is this a good idea? is it black hat? are they going to get slapped if someone reports them as a link farm? It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme. Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?
Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Ron10
-
Thank you!
-
My Linkscape knowledge comes mostly from a great Help desk response I received from Aaron regarding a question I submitted.
I do not otherwise know the answer to your question.
Aaron Wheeler said:
both Open Site Explorer and the Web App Link Analysis are based on our Linkscape Index of the web. I'm sorry that you haven't been able to see your links in Linkscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. Just so you know, here's how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we've crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of the amount in Google's index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index
We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we've got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule
Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.
For now, the best thing you can do to help your domain become indexed is to work on link building for links from sites with high mozrank.
-
Ryan, do you know if redirected links are visible in Linkscape? I am guessing that they are not.
-
They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices.
This is a very valid point... and at the same time it is good news if you know more effective methods.
-
Linkscape (SEOmoz tool for crawling links) only includes the top ?30% of web pages and their links. You are not likely to see links to local area plumber sites.
-
Ron,
The tactics your competitors are effective. They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices. If your site offers fantastic content combined with solid SEO, then you can blow your competitors sites off the front page of Google.
Your choices are:
-
hire an SEO
-
start with the Beginners Guide to SEO and incorporate every learning into your site
-
join your competitors on trying to work around the system until one of your competitors steps ups and leaves everyone in the dust
-
-
They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Are you sure about this?
Yes, or at least there are no other links that the mozbar seomoz link analysis shows, but they don't show all links. Many times it will show no links to a page and then you look up links through the Yahoo links report and will find 20 or 30 links that the mozbar didn't show. Does the mozbar not crawl as deeply as the Yahoo spider does?
-
It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme.
You should be praising God that they are wasting their time with all of this domain buying, credit card charging, alias creating, linking back and forth bullcrap. When they start doing something really effective you are in big trouble.
They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own.
Are you sure about this? If they have no links from outside of their own network of sites then links from these domains should be close to zero value. And, if they do have these links from outside of their own niche they would be more effectively used directed to a smaller number of sites - perhaps only their main site.
Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?
Its a common practice... but there are better methods of ranking highly.
Is this a good idea?
I think its a good idea to sell to your competitor.
(I know that a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this.... that's OK.
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
-
Server and multiple sites
We have multiple sites selling similar products in different ways but have always kept them separate on the off chance that google does not like it or they penalize one site. We have always put them on different servers but now thinking for performance as they are on shared hosting to put them on a single server which would be our own but we do not know the SEO considerations. We can assign multiple IPs to a server but I am not 100% sure whether there is still a negative impact of running multiple sites on the same server even if from a different IP. Any help would be appreciated, what I am really asking is could if they are on the same server with different IP's be still linked together by google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Steps to Improve Page Rank and Domain Authority
Hi If the quality of web pages is very good I believe rankings should reflect this. My domain is at least 3 years old.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy1
What steps would you recommend short term and long term in terms of how to improve page rank and domain authority? Thanks.0 -
Clean-up Question after a wordpress site Hack added pages with external links from a massive link wheel?
Hey All, Thought I would throw this out to ensure I am dotting my "i's" and crossing my "t's"..... Client WordPress site was hacked injected 3-4 pages that cross linked to hundreds (affiliate junk spam link wheel). Pages were removed, 3rd party cleared all malware/viruses. Heavy duty firewall and security monitoring are in place. Hacked pages are now showing as 404. No penalties, ranking issues....If anything there was a temporary BOOST in rankings due to the large link-wheel type net that the pages were receiving....That has since leveled out rankings. I guess my question is, in your opinion is it best to let those pages 404, I am noticing a large amount of links going to them from all over the world from this large link net that was built. I find the temptation to 301 re-direct deleted pages to the homepage difficult...lol..{the temptation is REAL}. Is there anything I am missing? Any other steps that YOU would take? I am assuming letting those pages 404 would be the best bet, as in time they will roll off index.... Thank you in advance, I appreciate any feedback or opinions....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Anthony_Howard0 -
Cross Domain Duplicate Content
Hi, We want create 2 company websites and each to be targeted specific to different countries. The 2 countries are Australia and New Zealand. We have acquired 2 domains, company.com.au and company.co.nz . We want to do it like this and not use different hreflang on the same version for maximum ranking results in each country (correct?). Since both websites will be in English, inevitably some page are going to be the same. Are we facing any danger of duplicate content between the two sites, and if we do is there any solution for that? Thank you for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
New un-natural links to my website that i didnt create.. and lots of them!
Hi There In the last few months my search organic traffic has gone down and i am looking into links to my website through webmaster tools. It looks like there is some sort of automated robot that is building new links to my website at a rate of 5 per week! All are spammy, directory links. It looks like this has been going on for a few months now. I have no idea how to find and stop this. But i have a feeling this might explain why my traffic is down. ALSO non of these links are in MOZ Open site explorer or Majestic SEO.. they are just showing as just discovered in webmaster tools. I am assuming that means its pretty accurate ?! ALL help is appreciated! Thanks! Paula
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Pixelstorm0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
Black linking exploitation
Hi all After watching our ranking for some primary keywords drop on Google from page 1 to 20 and then totally off the charts in relatively short period I've recently discovered through moz tools that our website along with other competitor sites are victims to black linking (may have the terminology wrong). Two primary words are anchor linked to our domain (www.solargain.com.au) being sex & b$tch through over 4000 compromised sites - mostly Wordpress - many which are high profile sites. Searching through the source code through half a dozen compromised sites I noticed that competitors are also linked using other derogatory terms, but the patterns indicate batch or clustered processing. The hacker has left some evidence as to whom they are representing as I can see some credible discussion forums which contain negative feedback on one particular supplier also among the links. Although this is pretty good evidence to why our ranking has dropped there are some interesting questions: A) is there any way to rectify the 4000 or so black links, mass removal or other. (Doesn't sound feasible)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mannydog
B) some competitors who dominate organic ranking through better optimization don't seem to be affected or apparently affected as much as our site at least. Which questions how much we are affected as a direct result from this hack.
C) is there action or support for industrial espionage?
D) can you request from google to ignore the inbound links and would they not have a duty of care to do so? I'm fairly new to this ugly side of the Internet and would like to know how to approach recovery and moving forward. Thoughts ideas very welcome. Thanks in advance.0 -
Spammy Links (from .ru) pointing to my domain! How to deal with it?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce store - I am just looking at the apache logs and I am finding a lot of spammy links that have been referrers to our pages - when I check the links, I cannot find our URL in an HREF on their page so I presume they may be using some country based cloaking? These are the domains that are targeting specific pages on our site:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs2010
http://3xru.ru/
http://saldoconsult.ru/
http://euro-casino.ru/casino/
http://delaymoney.maroderi.ru/
http://intimhot.ru/ How to deal with this? Our site is about cookware and they seem to be pointing these links to very specific products and categories. Never seen anything like this before, help would be appreciated. Thanks, B0