Why is this site not being punished!?
-
I guess this is the usual reaction to a seeing a domain rank above your own website is "They must be cheating"!
However... in this case I feel more than justified. The website is aircon247.com they rank top 3 in the UK for "air conditioning" and other quite generic terms in the industry. I'm interested to know your thoughts and what (if any) action should be taken. Here are many of the links that I think contravene the Google Guidelines :
Spammy Article Submissions with Inorganic Anchor Text:
http://www.furniturearcade.com/decorative-furniture/decorative-accessories-lamps/
http://www.sys-con.com/node/2308271
http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/imagine-a-world-without-air-conditioning-units-7-112555
http://www.retail-digital.com/press_releases/appliances/diy-air-conditioning-installation-options
http://www.livingwithwhite.com/three-fun-uses-for-antique-grates-and-floor-registers/
http://www.mcrjk2008.com/2009/04/best-air-conditioning-ever.html
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/comfort-your-business-needs-1682737.htm
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/diy-air-conditioning-installation-options-1677015.htm
http://www.housetohome.co.uk/topical-advice/531054/regulating-your-home-environment
http://homeklondike.com/2011/01/10/country-style-bedroom-design-ideas/
http://www.greenscenedebate.com/2009/04/take-good-luck-at-air-conditioning.html#.URzEmh17L5w
http://www.harlynn.com/2009/04/wanna-chill-out.html
http://www.loveshaven.com/2009/04/we-are-all-so-excited-for-my-sisters.html
http://asiwaspassing.com/2009/05/
Spammy Links in External Website Footers / Side Bars with Inorganic Anchor Text:
http://www.g-dir.com/home/gardening/
http://www.sefdir.org/popular-listings.html
http://rapidcoolsite.com/Home.html
http://www.singaporerealestate.info/blog/?s=%27the+solitaire+call%27
http://www.onlinepureherbs.com/acidity.htm
http://erostours.com/cheap-flights-Chicago.html
http://koolergazi.persianblog.ir/
Blog Spam Inorganic Anchor Text:
http://www.bluehatseo.com/quick-answers-1-link-building/
Spammy (Link exchange etc.) Directories:
http://ireland.accommodationforstudents.com/info/reciprocal_links_ad.asp
http://baliscript.net/barter-links.php
http://www.abacushosting.ca/linx.php
http://www.whelphelper.com/links.php
http://www.spectramedi.com/links_shopping.htm
https://www.midwayautosupply.com/linkexchange.aspx?
http://artsellart.com/links.html
http://www.linkalizer.com/directory/39-1/
http://dogdir.com/region/NA.php
http://www.easyezinearticles.com/ezineresources/Outsourcing.htm
http://www.patchhomeinspections.com/Links.html
-
We have someone with a shady link profile ranking above us too. Don't worry; as was already said, it's only a matter of time before they're gone. Just keep working on your long-term #RCS strategies, and they will pay off in the long run--probably sooner rather than later.
-
crappy links indeed, however the reason is probably because they are greatly varying the anchor texts.
for example: buy air conditioning units from Aircon247
if they were using "air conditioning units" over and over again they would get penalized for that but they are smart enough to know to create long tail variations that still contain the exact match "air conditioning units"
that being said, they still may get dinged. Google.co.uk competition is less than google.com competition too so it's much easier to rank in the UK. Hope this info helps.
-
Hey
Sometimes certain sites do manage to 'get away with it' for a bit longer but really, from a very quick look at their link profile, it looks super dodgy so I can't see them getting a free ride for much longer.
Really, I would forget about these guys, be happy that their is no longevity to their approach and that their days are numbered and focus on making the site you are working on as good as it can be in the meanwhile.
I know that is not an answer as such, but I doubt anyone outside of Google could give you a better one. You could get an fairly comprehensive seo audit done on their site and links etc but what would it achieve? You can't play the numbers game against this kind of profile so I would not even bother.
As it goes, it can be surprising how few real links you need to compete with this kind of profile and it may be that the competition in this sector are all just running the same weak strategies.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
How can I remove Japanese hacker in my site
Hello, How can I remove Japanese hacker in my site?? here i have attached screen shot for it , http://prntscr.com/cmxmmx My website is hacked From long, please help out to solve this Problem Thnx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | poojaverify060 -
Malicious links on our site indexed by Google but only visible to bots
We've been suffering from some very nasty black hat seo. In Google's index, our pages show external links to various pharmaceutical websites, but our actual live pages don't show them. It seems as though only certain user-agents see the malicious links. Setting up Screaming Frog SEO crawler using the Googlebot user agent also sees the malicious links. Any idea what could have caused this or how this can be stopped? We scanned all files on our webserver and couldn't find any of malicious links. We've changed our FTP and CMS passwords, is there anything else we can do? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
How will Google deal with the crosslinks for my multiple domain site
Hi, I can't find any good answer to this question so I thought, why not ask Moz.com ;-)! I have a site, let's call it webshop.xx For a few languages/markets, Deutsch, Dutch & Belgian, English, French. I use a different TLD with a different IP for each of these languages, so I'll end up with: webshop.de, webshop.nl, webshop.be, webshop.co.uk, webshop.com & webshop.fr They all link to eachother and every subpage that is translated from the other site gets a link as well from the other languages, so: webshop.com/stuff links to webshop.de/stuff My main website, webshop.com gets links from every other of these domain which Open Site Explorer as well as Majestic SEO sees as an external link. (this is happening) My question. How will Google deal in the long-run with the crosslinks coming from these domains? some guesses I made: I get full external links juice (content is translated so unique?) I get a bit of the juice of an external link They are actually seen as internal links I'll get a penalty Thanks in advance guys!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pimarketing0 -
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 -
Should we add our site to Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Getting sites unbanned in bulk
Prior to the Panda update we had 1 main site, and 300 or so satellite sites. The satellite sites all had an identical template with identical content. The satellite sites all got flagged, and the main site persevered. We'd like to TRY to get all of these sites unbanned in bulk. My question is...how 'DIFFERENT' should these sites be? I know that a real google employee will be looking. All of these sites will be in the same industry...so how 'different' can the content really be? I am going to try to do this in sets of 10 and purchase a different template for EACH city/satellite site, as well as having varying categories, but realistically how doomed/successful do you think this endeavor will be? Any advice? realistic timeline?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Will the links coming from an article in certain BLOG / NEWS SITE become a GOOD BackLink?
Such as, if i wrote a ymoz, and suddenly the articles is accepted, will the link to our site coming out of that Article Post increased our SEO Standing? Another example would be http://active.tutsplus.com , yesterday i have successfully pitched a tutorial idea, and they told me to write it so that they can published it , and they also promised that i will be able to put my site link (dofollow) ... But will these link be a Good BackLink that will increase our site's SEO Standing? The last one is exactly the same link , but this time coming from a News Site , such as http://teknologi.kompasiana.com/internet/2011/06/09/website-full-flash-dengan-inovasi-hebat-karya-indonesia/ , in this article (kompasiana is a very wellknown site news in Indonesia, in fact KOMPAS is the biggest newspaper firm in Indonesia) , our site is being featured , there is a link coming out of that article (DOFOLLOW), but will that link make our site much more SEO Friendly? Again please enlighten me 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IKT0 -
Should this site be punished?
Every summer for the past 4 years one of our customer's competitors suddenly has a big jump in Google's (.co.uk) rankings for some of the main industry phrases, particularly "air conditioning". We were always under the impression that they bought links before the busy summer season, as they have these strange massive jumps in the rankings. (for the rest of the year they often drop down) I recently checked out some of the back-links going to their site and noticed something I'd not seen before. Of the (approx) 480 links that showed up, around 80% of the SourceURL's ended with "?Action=Webring" (see 1st attached image). To me it doesn't look natural at all and I'm surprised that Google hasn't picked up on. Their site is www.aircon247.com. It had been mentioned to me that this may be to do with link sharing sites (which I assume is black-hat) but I'm not 100% sure that they are doing this. They also have an identical long spammy-looking footer at the bottom of every page which is clearly only for search engines to see. We reported it to Google a year ago but no action was taken. Do you think that it is acceptable to have it on every page? (see 2nd attached image) I would be interested to know your thoughts on both of these, and whether this would be a dangerous tactic to try and emulate? Gc5MU.png iXGA9.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | trickshotric0