Should this site be punished?
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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?
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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.
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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!
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