Blackhat Winners after Penguin 2.0
-
I know I'm not the only one that's seen this. After Penguin 2.0 some obvious blackhat SEOed sites flew up in the rankings. There's obviously a hole that hasn't been closed. I'm surprised it's been a month and that hole still hasn't been patched. I have no problem with other legit companies out ranking ours for various keywords. In that case I can feel alright knowing it's just something they were able to do that I wasn't but when I see complete blackhat sites ranking that's a whole different story.
Estimated traffic before and after Penguin 2.0: http://goo.gl/gurXt
What are they doing that's blackhat?
-
Hidden text - compare the cached version vs. the live http://goo.gl/YYGDK
-
301ing lots of domains, many irrelevant. http://goo.gl/RjOJu
-
Using a trade marked brand (steelers) - not SEO related but I'm sure the NFL wouldn't be happy.
-
Linking between other domains they own. Notice how spammy these sites are.
-
http://pittsburghwebdevelopment.org/2013/06/23/website-development-firm-website-design-pittsburgh/
-
http://seoinpgh.com/2013/06/23/website-designer-pittsburgh-affordable-web-design-in-pittsburgh-pa/
-
They were inflating their social presence. Wanted to show you but looks like twitter already took care of them https://twitter.com/seopittsburgh .
-
Also making client sites link to them .
I've talked to other people and they've seen similar things. Thoughts, opinions?
Can you find one good reason why this site would rank well for a competitive phrase?
-
-
I agree with y'all, this is definitely a short term win for your competitor. I've seen a lot of our competitors have short gains since penguin 2.0 with spammy tactics. It'll come back to bite them, we just don't know when.
EGOL, is right too, they are pretty dang good at blackhat. If there is a way to spam up the universe they've got it down to a science. I haven't looked at their backlink profiles, but I'd expect to see quite a few chinese domains in there.
-
Yes I have seen a lot of this too. I'm in competition with a bunch of companies using blackhat link building techniques and they are outranking me (sometimes) using these. Literally they are just doing article/link submission blasts with keyword targeted anchor text and it's working. Part of me thinks perhaps it's because EVERY site fighting for that phrase is using blackhat techniques and part of me thinks Penguin just isn't working well.
Either way I'm frustrated and each Monday I come in thinking.. "maybe today I'll start some blackhat link building."
The clock is ticking!
-
Yeah I agree it's only a matter of time before they're shut down. Just so frustrating to see and causes me to lose a little faith in how far along Google really is with this new playbook. I really like the direction they are going in. Just going to be a while before all the kinks are worked out.
-
Thoughts, opinions?
Looks like they have a site that is less than one-year old on a domain that might be infringing and are using a number of things that google is likely to penalize them for. They might be doing this same type of work for their clients. This sounds like a short-term problem for you.
One thing about Google is that relatively new sites doing shady stuff can persist for a while in the SERPs before Google finally slaps them down.
I think that you will eventually get their customers.
Can you find one good reason why this site would rank well for a competitive phrase?
Yes. They are pretty good at blackhat.... not the answer that you want... but I think its a good answer.
Was driving down West Liberty Ave one day and saw a new hair styling shop that opened. They had a sign out on the sidewalk... "Haircuts $5"..... about two blocks down the street a shop that has been in business for a long time put out their own sign.... "We fix bad haircuts $18".
You need to make a sign... "We fix bad SEO"
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
-
Killed by penguin 3
So with the update to penguin 3.0 last week we notice that some clients have been significantly hit by the update. How do we rectify the situation for the poor links that are on the site. We have used open site explorer and Google webmaster to try and identify which are the bad links to try and remove. Now we can spot that some inbound links are from directories that may be perceived as low value/spam, but could not be sure what is affecting the ranking. The vast majority of these links are historical prior to inheriting this client recently and so do not have any logins to remove the links (if there are logins). These appear to be placed by teams outsourced in India. We would suspect that no site owner would spend the time removing links from the site any way. How do we recover from the penguin hit. Is it just a case of trying to identify ones that we suspect could be perceived as spam and ask for these to be disavowed by Google? Do we contact all the sites to ask them to be removed and/or do we just push ahead with more engaging white hat methods of social SEO? Are we likely to recover in the short term or be permanently hit. The site is for a small business with no more than 800 monthly hits so this fall from grace off very good front page positions is going to hit our client very hard even if the sins are from a previous business. Any thoughts and suggestions PLEASE HELP
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smartcow0 -
Was I hit by Panda/Payday Loan/Penguin?
Good Mozzing, So, as some of you may know based on my previous post, I am working with an odd situation here. I have taken over an account for a company and the Main domain pretty much falls into the category of everything Google hates. I have suggested to the CEO that the practices they did before me were sorta in the Grayhat realm bordering on Blackhat but I need empirical data before I can make any drastic changes. In May and June of 2013 Panda, Penguin, and Payday Loan all had updates. Our company has nothing do to with porn, apartment rentals, finances, or anything like that, but the SEO methods used were, as I said, questionable. In June of 2013 there was a drop from 8,000 sessions to 5,000 sessions from organic traffic. If I switch over to all referring traffic the loss increases to 11,000 to 7,000 sessions. To me that seems pretty substantial. Not only that, but according to the data we have not been able to recover.There was a steady climb for about 5 months before the drop, and then now we are in this middle ground. I have only been here for about 2 weeks, so the things I have been uncovering are pretty amazing. Is that enough to assume that we were indeed hit by the updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler2 -
Google Panda and Penguin "Recovery"
We're working with a client who had been hit by Google Panda (duplicate content, copyright infringement) and Google Penguin (poor backlinks). While this has taken a lot of time, effort and patience to eradicate these issues, it's still been more than 6 months without any improvement. Have you experienced longer recovery periods? I've seen sites perform every black hat technique under the sun and still nearly 2 years later..no recovery! In addition many companies I've spoken to advised their clients to begin right from the very beginning with a new domain, site etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
Blog on 2 domains (.org/.com), Canonical to Solve?
I have a client that has moved a large majority of content to their .org domain, including the blog. This is causing some issues for the .com domain. I want to retain the blog on the .org and have it's content also show on the .com. I would place the canonical tag on the .com Is this possible? Is this recommended?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ngst0 -
My Penguin Recovery Attempt
So I have decided today to attempt to beat the odds and try and do a full recovery from the Penguin Update. I am going to create a Google Doc in which I will make public and link at the end of this post for all of you to see. I am going to meticulously go through a massive back link audit of my site and try to see if I can recover from my loss of some of my main keywords back from April 24th. I want to clarify that I DID NOT get effected from Penguin 2.0, but I did from 1.0 and have not recovered since. I have to be honest I feel like I have done everything up to now, but I realized I needed to make this a very long journey into a massive audit into my back link profile which contains thousands of back links which I have been honestly avoiding. I just want to see if I put the work, I will see the results and maybe it can help others I will document everything I do in detail as well as dates when I do them. I'm sure there will be plenty of coffee fueled nights of Jibber-Jabber...and I apologize for that ahead of time. I hope at the end there is light and can shed some on others. I am starting with a blank canvas, so keep checking back on my progress. I generally work at night so you will see most changes in the morning. Here is the link to my Doc - http://bit.ly/11dUkzc Wish Me Luck
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich1 -
Google Penguin for non-English queries?
Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update? All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RBenedict0 -
Google Penguin w/ Meta Keywords
It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed: I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization. If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so? The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot. Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings. I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account. Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0