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
-
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bwb0 -
Are bloggs published on blog platforms and on our own site be considered duplicate content?
Hi, SEO wizards! My company has a company blog on Medium (https://blog.scratchmm.com/). Recently, we decided to move it to our own site to drive more traffic to our domain (https://scratchmm.com/blog/). We re-published all Medium blogs to our own website. If we keep the Medium blog posts, will this be considered duplicate content and will our website rankings we affected in any way? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Why There is No link Data Available in my Webmaster Tools even the site has lots of links and webmastert tools account setup properly
i have few account in my webmaster tools that are not showing any link data even the has lots of links. i checked the setup and its everything is good. is some one tell me why there is no data coming through? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners1 -
Inbound Links Inquiry for a New Site
For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Site dropping in rank even through there are more backlinks being added
Hello, One of my client's sites is ranking lower than he should. This happened when we took off backlinks (20 little blogs, several site-wide paid links. It really dropped the site, but it had to be done. Since then we've increased his # of root domains by 10% through white hat link building in his non-competitive niche, and rankings are still poor. I know that's not much in the way of added backlink value, but we're working on it. My question is, how have the recent (and coming) updates possibly effected us. We want to take the remaining problem areas off right away, but another drop in traffic is not a good idea. Even though the blogs (see below) have no backlinks of themselves, they cause drops when taken off) He still has -20 little blog backlinks w/ a quarter of them being exact match anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW
-1 sitewide paid link - an image, exact match alt tag anchor text
-1 non-site-wide paid links that is an image near the footer, exact match alt tag anchor text.
-3 links on a domain, this one looks fairly editorial, but there are a bunch of paid links on that page. Changing to non-exact-match anchor text
-2 links on two domains that look completely editorial with no other paid links on that page. non-exact-match anchor text -70 backlinks total with about 1/3 being problematic. How does this site look in regards to updates and when to take links off without tanking our site even more? Thanks.0 -
competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority
According to my recent SEOmoz links analysis, my competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority... e.g. wedding site linking to a transportation attorney's website. Aother competitor site has an overall of 2 million links, most of which are seemingly questionable index sites or forums to which registration is unattainable. I recently created a 301 redirect, and my external links have yet to be updated to my new domain name in SEOmoz. Yet, by comparing my previous domain authority rank with those of the said competitor sites, the “delta” is relatively marginal. The SEOmoz rank is 21 whereas the SEOmoz ranks of two competitor sites 30 and 33 respectively. The problem is, however, is to secure a good SERP for the most relevant terms with Google… My Google pagerank was “3” prior to the 301 redirect. I worked quite intensively so as to receive a pagerank only to discover that it had no affect at all on the SERP. Therefore, I took a calculated risk in changing to a domain name that translates from non-latin characters, as the site age is marginal, and my educated guess is that the PR should rebound within 4 weeks, however, I would like to know as to whether there is a way to transfer the pagerank to the new domain… Does anyone have any insight as to how to go about and handling this issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eranariel0 -
Someone COPIED my entire site on Google- what should I do?
I purchased a very high ranked and old site a year or so ago. Now it appears that the people I purchased from completely copied the site all graphics and content. They have now built that site up high in rankings and I dont want it to compromise my site. These sites look like mirror images of each other What can I do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TBKO0 -
Somebody hacked many sites and put links to my sites in hidden div
I had 300 good natural links to my site from different sites and site ranked great for my keywords. Somebody (I suppose my competitor) has hacked other sites 2 days ago (checked Google cache) and now Yahoo Site Explorer shows 600 backlinks. I've checked new links - they all are in the same hidden div block - top:-100px; position:absolute;. I'm afraid that Google may penalize my site for these links. I'm contacting webmasters of these sites and their hosting so they remove these links. Is it possible to give Google a notice that these links are not mine so it could just skip them not penalizing me? Is it safe to make "Spam report" regarding links to my own site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zarades0