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?
-
Yes they "should" be punished. But they probably won't, at least not for a long time. To Google's own detriment they don't act on spam reports nearly enough, which results in spam working more than it should, which results in more spam... and frustrated competition who were playing fair deciding "If you can't beat them, join them". The all the combined intelligence over at Google you'd think they'd figure out that for long term benefits it's best to act on the spam reports instead of just gathering data from them.
-
My personal view, although I'm sure some will disagree and stamp on my toes, is that complaining about competitor tactics is a waste of time. The chances of Google adding a manual penalty based on your report is very, very slim so your time is better spent working out ways to beat them the right way.
Looking at their backlink profile, there are a huge amount of paid links, general directories and not really much else. With that in mind I'd say that although they have a decent amount of linking domains it should be possible to beat them without using the same tactics.
Another thing to remember is that even if you did go down the route of trying to copy their method you wouldn't be guaranteed to succeed so might waste a load of time and money with nothing to show but a penalty.
As for the spammy footer... it might be adding some benefit to their site but I doubt it's having a huge impact... and it just looks horrid!
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
-
Consolidating small sites into one big site
Hi I have several small review sites in multiple categories and want to consolidate them into a single review site(aged domain I just bought) I'd redirect the old sites to the new one. If I just copied all the old articles onto the new website with solid DA, would this work or would Google think Im trying to start a PBN? Thanks! Eddie
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | calentador20190 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Strange referral site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com would like some insights from the community
Hello Mozzers! I've noticed that our site has been receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from a rather suspect looking site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com Can anyone shed any light on this beast. Stopped receiving traffic around 11th November, but was getting 20K sessions over a 4 week period. The traffic was of poor quality, but would be good to know how or why they were linking to my site (fejobs dot com). Looks very suspicious. Thanks Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Forcing Entire site to HTTPS
We have a Wordpress site and hope to force everything to HTTPS. We change the site name (in wordpress settings) to https://mydomain.com In the htaccess code = http://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos Ensure we are using HTTPS version of the site. RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] but some blogs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19168489/https-force-redirect-not-working-in-wordpress say RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] Which one is right? 🙂 and are we missing anything?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | joony0 -
Is one of my competitors trying to get my site penalized?
Hi guys, I have been ranking #2 for a popular search term for several months now, and today I noticed a drop to #5, so I went to check my backlink profile, and I'm seeing thousands of no-follow exact keyword matched backlinks, all from spammy looking websites. I looked at some of the links and they do link to me, but I didn't generate these links, and I have never paid anybody externally to build links for me. What is the best course of action for me here? link disavow tool?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | davegill0 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
My Site having a drop in traffic with eash passing month
Hi, I'm running a text message site mixsms.com from 2009. It was performing good till Oct 2012. In the end of Nov 2012 I noticed a drop in traffic and then with each passing month I'm getting 1500-2000 unique visitors drop. In Oct 2012 my daily unique visitors were 15000+ each day and now it is just having 2000 after Feb end. I've done several things to improve my site. I changes the template, removed all unnecessary html elements, changed seo structure (optimize with all modern seo techniques). Stop backlinking from Nov 2012 but instead of getting improvements I'm continuously having a drop in traffic. I'll highly appreciate your time if you look into site deeply to findout exact issues that are causing for this drop. I'm even ready to hire any seo consultant if he is pretty sure to get 100% results. Thanks in advance for your support
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | intelmixx0 -
Has anyone been able to recover a site from that was slapped by panda?
I have a client that the only thing I can determine is over optimization of a couple anchor terms which the person no longer ranks for..I tried mixing up with brandname , brandname.com and a diversity of links but nothing seems to budge anyone have a similar problem?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foreignhaus0