Competitor ranking through SPAM
-
We have a competitor called SwitchWise who has done a whole heap of social bookmarking and article marketing, using a deceptive link with anchor text reading "i select electricity" which has got them ranking #2 in Australia for the term iselect (a big comparison company here in Aus).
The articles are low value, the link is deceptive and it is generally bad for the consumer. I could copy their tactics for my client, but I'm concerned about the links eventually being devalued and the company placed in the sin bin.
What is the best course of action as I really don't want to let them get away with this, either we need to be up there, or alternative we need to dislodge them.
p.s I know this is not a great keyword, but it's more about stakeholder management in terms of what my client sees and how they interpret what we are doing relative to their competitors.
-
Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback.
-
Hi Joshua,
Overall the competition doesn't look terribly high for that keyword. I always opt to keep it clean insofar as inbound link quality. There is very little reason you couldn't move SelectWise out of position two for this keyword.
Try the comparison product approach in inbound links. It helps the links look more editorial as opposed to trying to rank a competitor / alternate website for a potential brand or trademarked term company.
-
Check to see if they are buying links 1st. If they are, then you may be able to report them though Google Webmasters and they an get hammered. I did this for one of my shady competitors and they got wacked in the SERPS by Google. f they are article spinning, then I don't think you can really do anything about it. Anybody can article spin.
-
My client is not iselect, they are a direct competitor to switchwise.
It is more a question of risk and reward v danger. I don't really want to copy their SPAMMY tactics for the risk of having our site penalized, but it is hurting my relationship with my client for every day they stay there.
-
If your client is iSelect? It is down to them to them to do brand reputation management on the term, using their own properties "brand owned" to out rank the specific Switch Wise domain.
Really it raised an argument: is Switch Wise an affiliate of iSelect? Should they be targeting the brand terms via the organic space, it is easy to switch the off button on paid but with organic you really need to do your own reputation management.
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
-
I just want to ask Moz DA help anymore in Rank keywords
Hello Folks, i want to ask i have website related to kullu manali tour package and digital marketing institute, where tour package website DA is 2 and digital marketing institute DA is 26, my institute website rank on almost 1st page on most of keywords where travel website still doing struggle after much good links. please suggest me i need to boost my website DA.
Link Building | | ashux526g0 -
Nofollow links can hurt site rankings ?
can irrelevant nofollow links hurt site rankings? our website is about selling perfumes ... https://janraber.com/
Link Building | | hiseo770 -
How will it affect my site SEO, if I get backlink from a hign spam score percentage site like 70 % .
**Above how much percentage of spam score should I avoid getting backlinks. **
Link Building | | ShashankDubey10 -
Drop in Rankings After Removing Links
So I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
What are inbound links worth after Panda and Penguin, since a site ranks for the NATIONAL keyword "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS!?!?
ARE INBOUND LINKS TODAY ALMOST WORTHLESS??!!? After having been the KING of SEO, down to the toilet? Today I got a great sample from a fellow SEO professional showing a site, rockymountainfurniture.com rank for "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS FROM 3 DOMAINS and a domain trust of 14!!!! ON A NATIONAL, VALUABLE, HIGH QUERY VOLUME KEYWORD!! I was stunned, but is this the "NEW SEO WORLD" we live in, so we should skip spending hundreds of hours on link building? There are over 32 different types of inbound links but this is much MORE than a radical change, this is turning SEO as it was up-side-down. Any input, thoughts, ideas?
Link Building | | yvonneq0 -
Competitor analysis and broken links
I have just been looking at a competitors links and have discovered some of the links they have obtained dont actually exist when clicking through to the directory or blog in question, although still appear in opensiteexplorer. Is this common? and is it just a sign of bad link building practices?
Link Building | | Deanknight0 -
Frustrated with spammy backlinks from competitors
I've only been doing SEO for my company for the last month and I've made some headway but what is really frustrating me right now is a couple of competitors that have OBVIOUS spammy links ranking in the number 1,2,3 stops all over the board for the keywords i'm going for. One competitor in particular has anchor text links EVERYWHERE that make absolutely no sense...junk like... "I have never been more saddened by anything in my life than when my grandfather got cancer. I told my uncle he needed to buy some auto insurance. I really like pork." I mean, these links are the pages with the most page authority and page rank out of all of the ones they have...and I'd venture to say that almost all of their backlinks are like this...well, half of them are just random links with good anchor text on the sidebar of a bazillion spam websites (diapers, toys, fake blogs, etc.)...while i have about 3k links and most of my top competitors have about 5k links...these guys have over 33k. Worse yet, when I look at something like Alexa rank, they have pretty high overall traffic rank but it shows traffic rank in MX (mexico) instead of the US...these guys only sell in the US! I mean, they're black hat if I've ever seen such a thing and they rank superbly on all keywords. What can I do to compete with this junk?
Link Building | | jgower0 -
Link Spamming or Not? Block Internal Search Results From Indexing?
We are looking at providing our customers with the best experience when performing a site search for a product. Would it be bad SEO practice to have our internal search results show results for all 4 Brands linking to different domains? This would mean multiple outgoing links to other owned sites from the same IP. Is it a best practice to block internal search results using robots.txt?
Link Building | | SEO-Team0