How to combat competitor buying who is buying links and winning.
-
I have a competitor who is buying links in the Featured Advertiser Links section of Washington Post online.
His backlink profile is a very low # of referring domains. (38ish) with a good bit being repeats of Wahington Post.
My question, is their strategy within Google guidelines, and what can I do to combat it?
Thanks.
-
Thank you for helping me find them.
<a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">target</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">='_blank' href="http://www.weitzlux.com/mesothelioma_438.html" rel="nofollow">Mesothelioma</a>, <a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">target</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">='_blank' href="http://www.weitzlux.com/asbestos/attorney_433.html" rel="nofollow">Asbestos Attorney</a>, <a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">target</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">='_blank' href="http://www.weitzlux.com/orthoevra/patch_7852.html" rel="nofollow">Ortho Evra</a>
When I view the source they have "nofollow", which should remove their value for ranking a website and make these links OK with Google.
Would not bother me if my competitors were doing this. In fact, it would reveal to me that they think they are makin' munny.
-
Craig, thanks. Not really a fan of reporting either, just a little frustrated.
Egol, yes the links are in source code.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/postpoliticstv.html
-
When I go to the WP and find a page with a box of links labeled "Featured Advertiser Links" and I then view the source code of the page I do not see those links in the code.
Is that what you see when you do this?
-
Well many newspaper and magazines online have to sell advertising to make money because a lot of them hold a fair bit of power it is a link that could be worthwhile.
Personally if i was you id worry less about what links others are getting, and concentrate more on getting your own links, and if they are up to any unethical link building then it will only be a matter of time before that catches up on them.
I know its frustrating when someone is buying their way above you in the rankings, but that's life and in most niches people will do what it takes to get there.
There are various techniques which can be called link building, i would say the one you are suggesting falls into the " grey area " where it is considered to be bad practise however works a treat.
I wouldnt consider the washington post to be a link farm, not for now anyhow. And i know locally online newspapers in my area who offer articles on their websites for a fee/donation or whatever you want to call it.
Im not a fan of reporting things like that, whats for them wont go past them.
-
Thanks for response Craig, It is just links under the category Featured Advertiser Links. So it is a bit different than a traditional advertisement with a link. There are a number of links to different pages/products on their website.
Could/should they be reported?
-
Buying links is not something that you should do, however if he paid for an advert in the Washington Post to advertise his business, which so happens to also link to his website then so be it.
Buying links on link farms and similar sites will eventually harm a website. Ive saw this done and can work for a while, however i dont use this approach and would advise against it.
To combat it, you make sure you keep putting good content on your website, and work even harder at getting good quality relevant links to this content in order to rank well.
Quality over quantity always wins.
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
-
Should I get a link from a low quality directory?
While doing some backlink research of similar ranking sites I noticed that a few of them had links from a directory called Infignos, it has a moz DA of 37 and a low spam score of 3, so it doesn't look like complete junk. But the posts on it look terrible, like people are just putting keywords with a small description to get rankings. Should I bother posting something similar to be competitive or just move on? Any advice or feedback on this is much appreciated, I know some of these things are not quality sites but I was wondering the best way to filter that out. Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | iwantclarity0 -
I am looking to find the top pages based on traffic volume on my competitors websites, does anyone know of any good resources?
I want to know how which pages on my competitors websites are the most popular based on the traffic volume. I do not care how many links or directed to that page or any other metric. Only thing I am looking for is the traffic volume. It would also be nice to know the length of time spent on that page.
Competitive Research | | kanteenboy0 -
Via this intermediate link?
I'm doing some work on an ecommerce site for an electronics distributor and I've been seeing these "Via this intermediate link" notations from GWT under our "Links To Your Site" section. I understand how and why these notations would normally be displayed, however, these links are mainly coming from our direct competitors. Fearing that we might be a victim of a negative SEO attack, I looked into the situation and noticed that all of the links are from PDF's (technical data sheets) provided by the manufacturer that both we and our competitors use on our product detail pages. This still seems odd to me because, we download these pdf's and host them on our own site on our own servers under a completely different name (as I'm assuming our competitors do as well), yet, there still seems to be a connection between our sites through these PDF's. I've included a screenshot of some examples. Since we have thousands of SKU's on our site - with technical PDF's for nearly all of them - we're seeing a lot of links from competitors sites. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, I'm just trying to understand the situation more clearly. Has anyone had any similar experiences or some information from Google that might explain what I'm seeing here? fpWvB5T
Competitive Research | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Tool for discovering outbound links?
I want to find a tool where I can put in a url: www.site.com and it will tell me all the people that site links to. If this is in the Moz tool set, then I apologize. I couldn't find it. I can only find tools that tell me who links to a site, but not the other way around. Thanks, Ruben
Competitive Research | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Historical domain analysis & competitive link analysis
Hi. I have a problem with the analysis of my campaign and specialy with the historical domain and the competitive link. I don't see any upgrade since july. Thank you for your help. A.Reille
Competitive Research | | Alex750 -
Best Link Analysis Tool?
Now that the Yahoo Site Explorer is not usable on sites unless they are in your Bing Webmaster Tools, what is the best tool out there to see an accurate list of inbound links to a site? Google tools are still pretty unreliable from what I can see...
Competitive Research | | Bandicoot0 -
Is it possible to see how many visitors a competitor has received for any given keyword over a set time period?
Is it possible to see how many visitors a competitor has received for any given keyword over a set time period via either Organic / Paid means? Thanks
Competitive Research | | jaycfc1230070 -
Link analysis competitors
Am I missing something here or does SEO Moz only support three competitor sites to do comparisons against in each campaign? If not where do I add another website to the list to compare against? Thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | AdenBrands0