How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?

[Peter.Huxley59]

Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011.

Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18.

An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are:

http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13

http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\

However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages.

Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority.

Our website is www.anteater.com.au

Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?

[Peter.Huxley59]

Thanks for the info guys

[bronxpad]

If the links that are passing juice are media related, government related or edu type links then those can carry a ton of weight. They are worth Morty than a thousand crappy links combined.

[crazyjayd]

Also, out of those 500 plus links they have coming in, they might have 10-20 really high quality links mixed in that are really passing juice.

[bronxpad]

Domain age can also be a factor. Also remember that when Panda was released an astounding 12% of sites were impacted. This either means the rest of the sites on the net are all white hat or just slipped through the cracks. Googles algorithm is by far one of the most advanced in the industry but the web is vast and it might take a while for your competitors to get caught for there tactics. I agree with EGOL, focus on your site. Social promotion and conversions. In time white hat will prevail.

[EGOL]

I am not trying to be a wise guy... just saying what I would tell a friend or an employee... and the opinion that I hold for myself.

I think that you have discovered that the trust and authority numbers are not what google is using to rank websites.  In fact google in the past couple of months has dramatically altered the way that they consider links.

Panda, nofollow, and google information never yet revealed make the link metric waters really muddy.  There is a really good chance that lots of links have been made worthless... and others are depreciating assets.

I am betting my money elsewhere.

So, the most reliable way to advance the success of your website is to focus your efforts on increasing the  appreciation of your website by your visitors.

Name the most successful sites on the web.  This is what they do first and foremost leaving SEO as a five minute job for each page of content.