How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
-
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry.
They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors.
It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
-
Kevin, can you give us any type of update as to how this turned out? Did the rankings drop back after a bit, or are they still there? Did you figure out if they were using any shady tactics?
-
There are a lot of analysis you need to do to find out whether a person is doing BH on their site (just like NY Times hiring a SEO company to research on JC Penny) as there are a lot of plays you can play around with to try and trick Google.
Just some examples:
Onsite
- Are they stuffing keywords?
- Are they using doorway pages?
Offpage
- Are they buying links?(Most common)
- Are they spamming blog comments?
At the end of the day, if you find out that they are actually using BH method, you can report them from Google Webmaster Tools, make sure you put in all your evidence as they would not spend the time analyising each request.
-
Hi Kevin,
It is really hard to assume that a website is using BH unless I am able to check them myself, but for starters (which I believe you already did) you can always check the FF: PR, Links (inbound & outbound) use yahoo for this, use the tools in SEOmoz for this too to determine the quality of links.
You see it could also mean that those websites are of diff. IP's and each site is linking to authority domains, needless to say but you also have to check your website if it is really optimized and the duration thereof for its caching.
Now this is a handful but I am excited as to the outcome of this.
Cheers!
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
-
Will pillar posts create a duplication content issue, if we un-gate ebook/guides and use exact copy from blogs?
Hi there! With the rise of pillar posts, I have a question on the duplicate content issue it may present. If we are un-gating ebook/guides and using (at times) exact copy from our blog posts, will this harm our SEO efforts? This would go against the goal of our post and is mission-critical to understand before we implement pillar posts for our clients.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Olivia9540 -
I would like opinions on Brian Dean's training courses and his advice -- is it useful?
I would like opinions on Brian Dean's training courses and his advice -- has anyone used it successfully? Is it worth the cost? And useful?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marketingdepartment.ch1 -
Is there any SEO impact to using "www" vs. non-"www" preferred domain name?
My client has been using "www" with his domain and before I took over, has used it in marketing etc. I typically don't use "www" in my wordpress setup, and set non-www as the preferred domain in google analytics and google search console. Does it make any difference? Especially when www resolves to non-www? I appreciate some guidance with this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chill9860 -
Can anyone suggest good keywords for this
hello everyone, can you please suggest Good Keywords for my client domain www.amojobs.com. Any one can help please ?? my client Need it urgent.. Thanx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | poojathakar0 -
Competitor website, how come they get away with it?
Hi we have been looking at competitors websites do see how we can improve, this website jumped out at me straight away as spammy gateway pages where 3 words was the only difference on all of the pages. Why does google give them so much weight still and rank them so highly? I thought this is what G was trying to avoid? Am I missing something here in terms of great SEO opportunity? A checked for noindex or canonical and I cannot see any. Love to hear some feedback. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Do I need to use meta noindex for my new website before migration?
I just want to know your thoughts if it is necessary to add meta noindex nofollow tag in each page of my new website before migrating the old pages to new pages under a new domain? Would it be better if I'll just add a blockage in my robots.txt then remove it once we launch the new website? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Link Building using Badges
In light of penguin update, is link building using badges(like "I love SEOMOZ" badge) still considered a white hat tactic? I have read old posts on SEOMOZ blog about this topic and wondering if this method is still effective. Look forward to feedback from MOZers.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Amjath0 -
Opinions Wanted: Links Can Get Your Site Penalized?
I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal. When I initially read this article, I was happy. It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again. The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz. Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue. There seems to be a few different opinions: The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued. The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility. The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor. Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about. I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point. It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that. What do you guys think? Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other? Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another? Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept? I'm curious to hear your responses.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnthonyMangia0