Backlinks... If you can beat them & join them?!
-
I have a competitor who has swooped in on most of the key search terms in my niche, solely through artificial backlinking. There is a direct and obvious correlation between this link building and rise in the serps.
I know the mantra around here is creating good content and gaining real links, which I am doing. But I am waiting to unleash this content during a site relaunch which is months away. I don't want to sit around and do nothing while this site makes money and builds their list.
I have money to spend and want to go head to head with this site. Would it make sense for me to go and copy all of the links this competitor has built? At least 90% of them are profiles, article subs and blog comments. Also, what do you think would be the best way to tackle this?
Any guidance as always is appreciated.
-
I agree with Ryan.
Those spammy links will cost you time and money - and it is a gamble that they will work long term.
Invest that money in a quality attack that will benefit you long term and beyond.
-
You have identified your competitor as having "artificial" links. It is likely many of those links have been devalued by Google and do not offer any benefit to the site. If that is the case, the site may even earn a penalty at some point due to inorganic links. It would be foolish for you to copy the bad links from your competitor.
I understand you are viewing your competitor's site and have determined the reason for the site's performance is these links. There are over 200 factors in determining a web page's ranking. It's entirely possible there are other factors causing the site to rank well and links are not the primary cause of the site's success.
Either way, you seem to clearly understand the process. You want to EARN links. You will never beat your competitor by copying their links. Examine your competitors profile so you can find opportunities and gather ideas. Work to capture some of the strong links from your competitor but leave the rest. You want to earn organic links in content.
What do you think would be the best way to tackle this?
You could choose to report your competitor to Google's spam team. They may take action based on your report. If action is taken, it will likely be months later.
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 want to know about the Impact of Do-follow backlinks and No-follow backlinks for increasing DA.
Have Do-follow backlinks and No-Follow backlinks same value to increase Domain Authority in Moz? Recently, I have created 290 profile backlinks which was do-follow. But from yesterday I have seen all backlinks are no-follow now according to the decision of sites' owners. My site's DA has already increased up to 35. Will this DA fall gradually from now? Apart from it, if I have created same backlinks for my another site; will my DA be 35? Please try to clarify it. My site is: Homeworkpaper.net Thanks. Waiting for your valuable answer.
Link Building | | darrellpc1 -
Payday loan backlinks
Dear Friends, I just checked my backlinks in Ahrefs because my traffic has been dropping since the last 4 weeks. I have 2 questions is google penguin a part of Google core algorithm yet like Google panda is? I have backlinks of Payday loans which many webmasters claimed were the problem. The anchor text was payday loans. The sites hardly have any pagerank or anything. What is the way forward for me? So i contact the webmasters, and they dont reply then disavow the links or disavow them directly knowing that google hates pay day loans backlinks
Link Building | | marketing910 -
Impact of distribution of backlinks across multiple pages
Community, I would be interested to see if anyone has been seeing any experiments, experience documentation, or other data that would give context around the impact of pointing backlinks not just to your money page / home page but distribute it across pages. When doing competitive research I often run into competition which has lower domain strength and page rank but a link profile that is more spread out across their domain; these competitors often outrank my site despite their individual page properties being weaker. Any reference to existing documented experiments, personal experience or guidance is welcome.
Link Building | | italiansoc0 -
Question on backlinks indexing
Hello, my site is fairly new and I started building a lot of backlinks to it by posting my 5 from my website to several different web 2.0 and then posting all those 5 articles again to different article submissions + getting social bookmarks to my main site as backlinks. My question is: Should I throw all those backlinks in an indexer to get them all indexed at once / ping them all OR do I let google crawler naturally find them and index them itself sort of like 'dripping' as it will find it one by one; stack by stack? I would also like to know why Yahoo! hasn't indexed my site yet 😞
Link Building | | 6786486312640 -
How can I Improve My Site Page Rank?
How can I improve my site page rank? We were a three now a two as of today. How can I get it back to three at least or more?
Link Building | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
Page Authority & Domain Authority
Hi Guys, I am trying to educate myself a much as possible about link building to get higher positions. Please can you tell bit more about Page Authority & Domain Authority ? Also how important are these factors really? Thanks Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
How important are edu and gov backlinks?
I have heard that edu and gov backlinks are important but how so in a niche area like mine - real estate? Perhaps I am missing the point but I do not see how either type of site would ever backlink to a commercial real estate entity. If these are that important in theory, are they obtainable in practice?
Link Building | | casper4340 -
Is there a cost per acuqistion figure I can quote that if I hire an agency to link build that we can guarantee a level of increased traffic from Google?
I am looking to justify to a pubilsher the cost outlay to hire an agency to do white hat link building for me as we do not have time. (the site is fully optimised but we lack the inbound links our competitors have) - is there a way I can explain in terms of numbers ie page impressions that if we build for eg 10k high quality anchor text links into our site we will get x thousand more page impressions as our rankings in the search engines will increase? Just need a justification before the budget is allocated.
Link Building | | Pday0