Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My competition is using 1px images and links without anchor text. Good or bad idea?
-
I've been scoping out some of my competition and I noticed the number 1 ranking site is doing a lot of "interesting" stuff. I saw a bunch of 1px blank images that they must be using for the alt tag keywords. I also noticed several links to internal pages with different keywords without anchor text so they don't actually appear on the page. Is this considered black hat? Should I be doing something similar? It feels like the work I'm doing to try to rank #1 with a clean/professional looking site are wasted when the #1 sites are doing things like this.
-
What is the best method to report spam to Google and Bing?
-
Good on you, some guy the other day on bing forum, wasted an hour of my time trying to work out why he could not get in bing serps, then i noticed over 1,000 keywords in the noframes tag, I was very pissed off, he must of know what his problem was, so i took an extra 5 minutes to report him.
-
Absolutely. I don't mind losing out to hard work but when I'm going up against cheaters I have no problem blowing the whistle. Google was easy and has a Chrome extension as well. Bing, I had to search for a link to email support and I had to provide my name/email which I think is annoying and probably deters people...but I did it anyway.
-
Did you report to Bing and Google?
Many complain but few actualy bother to report spam
-
Sounds good. I figured I shouldn't do the same but wanted to confirm. I didn't realize how easy it was to report spam so that's done. Thanks.
-
I would not use 1x1 pixels to give links or anchor text. That could get you in trouble with search engines for trying to hide something.
I honestly doubt that this is helping your competitor and is certainly more risky than helpful.
Just stay the course on improving your site. You will beat them when Google thinks you deserve it... or when Google drops them for trying to hide links.
-
You should not do the same, but report the spam to both google and bing.
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 relationship between inbound links and linking domains?
In doing competitor research, there's a specific competitor that has fewer linking domains, but dramatically more inbound links. How do these two relate to each other? I do have a higher domain authority and more internal followed links with them having more internal nofollow and external (both follow and nofollow) links. I'm trying to understand how they can have 3.7k linking domains and 4.8 million inbound links while I have 4.1k linking domains and only 601k inbound links. What really defines an inbound link and what's there relationship between inbound links and linking domains?
Competitive Research | | grayloon0 -
Should I get a link from a low quality directory?
While doing some backlink research of similar ranking sites I noticed that a few of them had links from a directory called Infignos, it has a moz DA of 37 and a low spam score of 3, so it doesn't look like complete junk. But the posts on it look terrible, like people are just putting keywords with a small description to get rankings. Should I bother posting something similar to be competitive or just move on? Any advice or feedback on this is much appreciated, I know some of these things are not quality sites but I was wondering the best way to filter that out. Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | iwantclarity0 -
Blocking Competitive Analysis Tools in robots.txt.... Worth it?
I've been considering blocking third party crawlers for a while – specifically those crawling my website for the sake of competitive analysis, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. I'm familiar with how to do so, but when researching the question I found practically no one asking the same question. The guides I've found on what to put in your robots.txt make no mention of whether to block competitive analysis crawlers. Which makes me wonder whether this is a good idea after all. My chief concern here is rival sites going after the same search terms we target – one of our competitors in particular has an uncanny way of going after the same searches we are. I know blocking crawlers won't prevent competitors from watching our content, but it will make it slightly harder for them. Is there any major drawback I'm missing? Any big reason not to go ahead and block SEO analysis crawlers?
Competitive Research | | davidwaring0 -
Does link equity still count after an expired domain is purchased?
Hi guys, We've recently noticed a (very) minor competitor competing with us, as well as some of our industry's biggest names, in the Google SERPs - and the reason why has us absolutely stumped. Aside from an awful website from an aesthetic/UX point of view, their on-site content is horribly over-optimised, with keywords on the homepage even STRONG TAGGED for crying out loud! A backlink check using OSE and Ahrefs found 19 linking domains - most of which were just trash - but there were 5 that boasted some decent DA, the highest being 43. The thing is, these 5 sites are all very generic industry-relevant "blogs" that provide exceptionally poor quality content. The thing is, they have some very high quality backlinks (the BBC, the Guardian and CNN to name just three) acquired when the websites were something different entirely. The competitor has basically bought expired domains, turned them into basic websites related to our industry and linked them to their main domain. My question then is: is this competitor benefiting from the very high quality links that are pointing at sites that are then linked to their main domain? I found an article from 2009 that suggested old links stop counting after being purchased by someone else, but we are stumped as to why they could be otherwise. Thanks in advance everyone! John
Competitive Research | | NAHL-14300 -
Alternatives To Link Detective
Hi, A while back I used link detective to scan through our OSE reports. However, it seems that the site is no longer maintained and the system no longer seems to work, ie I upload the CSV file and then when i check back it leads to a blank screen. I wonder if anyone knows of a similar software as its functionality was very useful. Thanks
Competitive Research | | bobanna1 -
Internal/External link ratio
I have a client who ranked #3 for a very important and highly competitive keyword phrase. Using the 'Compare Pages' tool in open site explorer I could see that we were far better optimized than the two websites that were out ranking my client. Our PA was higher, the MozRank was higher, more internal and external links (and the external are all high quality) more linking C blocks etc.. etc... not just the page but the website, in general, was better optimized. The one thing I did notice was that although we had more internal and external links, our ratio was far heavier to the external side than the ratio of either competitor. So, at a loss of what else to do, I went through the website and beefed up the internal links to the specific page in question. I didn't over do it, just moved up from about 6% to about 12% (one competitor was at about 20% while the other was about 65%). Six days later we are number two rather than number three. Coincidence? Should I beef it up even more? Has anyone ever come across anything like this? Thank you for your comments in advance.
Competitive Research | | Vizergy0 -
Use abbreviations for domains?
hi, can i use abbreviations for domain, if i want to purchase a long keyword domain like 29 characters? abbreviations are good for SEO or GOOGLE appreciate it or not? and use that keyword in description of the site or title of the site need your help..
Competitive Research | | parallelseo0 -
Does it makes any difference if i use 's' at the end of keyword.
In terms of ranking and other stuff, how does adding 's' at the end of a keyword works ? For example - 'Custom Cases' in place of 'Custom Case' I am getting different results as well for both. Please advice....
Competitive Research | | viniyog0