Who's still being outranked by spam?
-
Over the past few months, through Google Alerts, I've been watching one of our competitors kick out crap press releases, and links to their site have been popping up all over blog networks with exact match anchor text.
They now outrank us for that anchor text. Why is this still happening? Three Penguin updates later and this still happens. I'm trying so hard to do #RCS and acquire links that will ensure our site's long-term health in the SERPs.
Is anyone else still struggling with this crap?
-
This is nothing new .. this is like playing Russian roulette .. they are taking the risk and they are enjoying the benefits while the sun shines. I do not think we can do anything to change this situation.. hope Google is listening and will come up with something and believe me this tool will not make any difference -
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en
I have tried this many times and of course no result so far.
-
Ah. Well, at least you got a reply!
-
I 100% agree with this, and I am working on long term strategies in the hopes that our competitors will face consequences soon enough--two of our biggest competitors were completely destroyed by the first Penguin. It's a little hard when you have higher ups demanding answers as to why we went from number #1 to #4 over the past three months.
-
Yes, I did that yesterday, but unfortunately, a few weeks ago I got an email from Google saying they received a spam report I sent them for a different site over eight months ago, so I'm not expecting any kind of expedient action on Google's part.
-
I'm seeing it less and less in the travel space. But when it does happen I agree that it's hugely frustrating. You simply have to keep on doing the right thing in the firm belief that Google will reward you in the end. Don't be tempted to copy spammy techniques because (a) you'll probably suffer in the long run, and (b) it might not actually be those that are causing your competitors to outrank you.
-
Have you tried a webspam report?
-
The recent algo updates to catch this sort of stuff seem to be a bit hit and miss at the moment. But it does give us reason to believe that Googs are actively working on removing the trash, but it is still just an algo, it's not perfect. Hopefully they'll continue getting even better at identifying and removing spam.
-
Everyday I keep seeing spam website ranking at the top, frustrating to see that they are up there.
Example 1, we are trying to #1 for a educational course name for a client that is a training school. They are currently being outranked by a website that has about 90% exact match Japanese blog comments, simply because those blog have a high DA.
Example 2, we have a regional client trying to rank for [keyword] + [city name], they are being outranked by an EMD who has 1 link, which is a directory. Whereas we keep pushing new content on the client's site and building their social networks. Sure, the number 1 website isn't doing any shading spam techniques, but they are simply ranking because of their domain names which I thought Google's latest update would of fixed that..
-
Yes - I am struggling with exactly the same issues. I actually sent a private question to SEOMoz last month asking for advice because I was so frustrated. One of our competitors has set up hundreds of fake blog networks with exact match anchor text all over the place linking back to their ecommerce site (to the tune of 300,000+ links)....I know their tactics, because I used to work for them (and it's obvious when looking at their inbound links in ahrefs.com). I disagreed with their SEO approach and frequently voiced my opinions. Fortunately, I was hired away by one of their competitors
Now I work for a great, honest, hard-working company that does great #RCS every day. Still my former company, even after Penguin and Panda and more Penguin and Panda, consistently makes Page 1 while my current company is lucky to make Page 2 for some really important keywords. It is very very frustrating!
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
-
Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?
Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection. The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built. That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster. Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site. These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings. Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | williamgoodseoagency.com0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
Why are "outdated" or "frowned upon" tactics still dominating?
Hey, my first post here. I recently picked up a new client in real estate for a highly competitive market. One trend I'm noticing with all the top sites they are doing old tactics such as:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jay328
-Paid Directories
-Terrible/Spam Directories
-Overuse of exact text keywords for example: City name + real estate
-Blogroll/link exchange
-Tons of meta key words
-B.S. press releases blog commenting with kw as name Out of all the competition there is only one guy who is following the rules of today. One thing I'm noticing is that nobody is doing legit guest blogging, has great social presence, has awesome on page, etc. It's pretty frustrating as I'm trying to follow the rules and seeing these guys kill it by doing "bad seo". Anybody else find themselves in this situation? I know I'm probably beating a dead horse but I needed to vent about this 😉2 -
Site architecture change - +30,000 404's in GWT
So recently we decided to change the URL structure of our online e-commerce catalogue - to make it easier to maintain in the future. But since the change, we have (partially expected) +30K 404's in GWT - when we did the change, I was doing 301 redirects from our Apache server logs but it's just escalated. Should I be concerned of "plugging" these 404's, by either removing them via URL removal tool or carry on doing 301 redirections? It's quite labour intensive - no incoming links to most of these URL's, so is there any point? Thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Can i send a disavow if a detect a spam link
I have detected than one web domain is generating 2400 links to my site should a use a disavow tools, as it is imposible to have contact from webmaster and no response to your emails My web as not been warned or penalized, but i dont like this link, and i want to inform google of that,. If google acepts the disavow file, should i still see on my webmaster tools that web links, or will they desapear thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
What to do if you've been hacked.....
Just logged into our CMS system and it appears we have been hacked. All page titles have been hijacked adding a secondary title tag linking out to website http://emapaydayloans.com with anchor text pay day loans. Our Web Dev team are working on fixing the hack now. My concern is the potential knock on effect to SEO. This looks like a bad neighbourhood site: 3 pages indexed PR 0 And for I don't know how long we've had almost every page on all our domains linking out with the following page title including the same link and anchor text: payday loans I assume its a wait and see at this stage.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0