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
-
Which is the best tool to check number of css, js, images and it's size?
Hello Team, Can you please suggest which is the best tool to check number of css, js, images and it's size of my competitors? Also what if they are using CDN network and bundling? Will that tool consider that also? Thanks! Wrights
Competitive Research | | wright3350 -
What type of links to focus on...
Hi all Having just built a new site, I'm now looking at how best to SEO it. In past years, I gave into the temptation to outsource the backlinking altogether. For this project though, I am taking a much more hands on approach: I am either writing or working with good content writers I am posting to Twitter + FB more regularly With regards to backlinks, I am being much more specific as to how I go about it. I want to remain very niche specific and use only trustable sites. The question I have though, is how to know how to split the backlink types? I've looked at competitors using LinkDetective, but cannot seem to work out any common denominators. Some have more blogs than articles, while others have a lot of 'unknown' types (according to LinkDetective) If you're starting from scratch, what do you aim for? If you're aiming to build 100 backlinks (hypothetically), how would you decide on the breakdown (e.g. 20% blogs, 20% articles etc) Do Panda or Penguin updates this year influence choice? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | avgjoe0070 -
Query for checking is a link to domain A already exists on domain B
Hi, I was wondering if anyone can help. I need to have a simple check where I have 2 domains, and I can check of there are any links from domain A to domain B. Does anyone what would be the best query for this and if you would use google, bing, yahoo or other SE. Many thanks
Competitive Research | | James770 -
Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?
I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links. I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports. The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B. Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something? Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site. Is there a reason these are appearing? I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors. However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate? Thanks
Competitive Research | | zazo0 -
What's the best way to make sure a link is worth getting?
I know what tools to use and I use all of SEOmoz's tools daily. PA, DA, MR, & MT are all things I take into account, but sometimes all you have to do is look at a site and you can tell it's not worth it. I'll analyze the page's backlink's and everything in between. Are there any tricks out there that can help the decision making process? I'm tired of trying to get links on sites that clearly are not worth it, but all of their stats say otherwise. So do you stick with stats, or is it a judgement call? I'm particularly curious about determining the amount of possible traffic from a link. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
When providing search results for SEO purposes to you use the exact results in Google Adwords
Hi Mozzers Just quick question When an SEO company are supplying their testimonials for example
Competitive Research | | mcliddy
Keyword Search Term has 33,000 visits a month
Keywords is in position 1 but the search volume they are showing is broad, i was always brought up to do research on exact results unless im using the reserch for a PPC campagin? Has anyone got any ideas?? should it be braod im looking at or exact?? Many Thanks Matt0 -
What is the right way to due a competitive Link analysis?
Trying to use the saturation report suggestion with no luck for google.com,and looking for away to benchmark either Pagerank or page authority to figure out how many links are required to overr take competitors from diversified sources. What is the process to do this to get the best results for the client.
Competitive Research | | bmcfarlane0 -
How do you perform competitive research for SEO?
What metrics tell you the most when you're looking at your competitors across the search landscape? PageRank/MozRank Inbound links Keyword rankings Alexa/QuantCast/etc. Pages indexed Something else entirely? What numbers speak volumes to you when you want to get an idea of how you benchmark against your competitors? And how do you communicate these results?
Competitive Research | | jcolman2