How to check if a site is doing blackhat SEO?
-
Thanks in advance!
-
It really depends on what you define as blackhat. On-page trickery (cloaking, redirects for search engines bots, etc.) can be discovered by browsing as a search bot, digging into code, viewing caches, etc. Danny Sullivan and Rand uncovered a large amount of cloaked (and stolen) content on stage at SMX Sydney a few years ago. It was quite entertaining at the time
Some people are basic enough to use tactics like hidden, white-on-white text, as Martijn says. I'm yet to see that tactic actually working post-2004 though
If it's links they're using, the easiest way is to use a tool like Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs or similar to check the links out. Sneaky people can block the OSE / Ahrefs / MajesticSEO bots from crawling the sources of their backhat links if they have access to the linking sites. You can block the bots either in robots.txt or by rejecting the visits to stop the bots from noting that the links exist. That way, the backlink analysis tools will never see that blackhatsite.com links to rankingsite.com, and so forth. It takes a big network that the spammer controls to block link research tools' bots' access to every link you build, however, so this isn't too common.
Whether all big brands / well ranked sites are using blackhat tactics pretty much depends on your definition of blackhat, but it's certainly true that it is very hard if not impossible to rank top 3 for competitive terms (car insurance, poker, credit cards) without parting with money that results in links being built. This doesn't mean that they're all buying links, but they're definitely investing in marketing that results in links, and the whitest of the whitehats will say that this is technically not organic, natural link development. It is, however, what we do - marketing.
-
Why does it matter?
-
An even easier way is to check their rankings - if they're top 3 for big money terms in their niche, they're probably using some blackhat tactics. Even the whitest of whitehats are still using some blackhat tactics in the background, despite people not wanting to admit it.
-
I can't agree more with Gary, we probably need some more information to know what kind of black hat you're possibily dealing with. One of the first things I tend to look at trying to find out if the site is using some ways of black hat tactics are:
- Backlink profile, if the quality of links is low or certain percentages between follow/ nofollow links are different then it could be a sign.
- Look at the site with Google as a user agent and see if the site is showing different information then to a real user.
- Just do a select all on the site to see if they hide any content (yup, still happens).
-
Your question is a bit to open ended, what do you want to achieve by knowing this information.
Does a site rank better than you?
Are they doing negative seo to other people?
Do they steal content from people?Are they building links as dofollow from places they should not?Too many questions to ask before answering such a vague answer.
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
-
Hlp with site setup
Hi there and thanks for the great information, certainly lots to take in. Can anyone suggest the best way to setup product / category url structure for a store? At the moment we have something like domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html As the product url, we edited url structure using a plugin, we don't use default WooCommerce url settings. domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html. this can sometimes be long But when you click on the product the url changes to the following. domainname.com/product name.html. This can shorted the url by 40% and still have keyword in url Is there any benefit in doing his? Re canonical urls, I only have about 15 products that are selected in many categories.the other 200 are under once category only. Product pages don't have many backlinks at the moment. Thanking you so much.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IvanaDaulay0 -
GTLD for SEO?
Hey guys Has there been any case studies or does anyone know how the gTLDs are doing in the SERPS? I never see them in the SERPS but that of course doesn't mean anything. Google is saying that they treat them the same as .com or .net. But does anyone have 'facts'? Cheers!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OscarSE0 -
Ecommerce sites we own have similar products, is this OK?
Hello, In one of our niches, we have a big site with all products and a couple more sites that are smaller niches of the same niche. The product descriptions are different with different product names. Is this OK. We've got one big site and 2 smaller subsides in different niches that cross over with the big site. Let me know if Google is OK with this. We will have a separate blog for each with completely different content. There's not really duplicate content issues and although only the big site has a blog right now, the small ones eventually will have their own unique blog. Is this OK in Google's eyes now and in the future? What can we do to ensure we are OK? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW1 -
Negative SEO Click Bot Lowering My CTR?
I am questioning whether one of our competitors is using a click bot to do negative SEO on our CTR for our industry's main term. Is there any way to detect this activity? Background: We've previously been hit by DoS attacks from this competitor, so I'm sure their ethics/morals wouldn't prevent them from doing negative SEO. We sell an insurance product that is only offered through broker networks (insurance agents) not directly by the insurance carriers themselves. However, our suspect competitor (another agency) and insurance carriers are the only ones who rank on the 1st page for our biggest term. I don't think the carrier sites would do very well since they don't even sell the product directly (they have pages w/ info only) Our site and one other agency site pops onto the bottom of page one periodically, only to be bumped back to page 2. I fear they are using a click bot that continuously bounces us out of page 1...then we do well relatively to the other pages on page 2 and naturally earn our way back to page 1, only to be pushed back to page 2 by the negative click seo...is my theory. Is there anything I can do to research whether my theory is right or if I'm just being paranoid?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheDude0 -
A doorway-page vendor has made my SEO life a nightmare! Advice anyone!?
Hey Everyone, So I am the SEO at a mid-sized nationwide retailer and have been working there for almost a year and half. This retailer is an SEO nightmare. Imagine the worst possible SEO nightmare, and that is my unfortunate yet challenging everyday reality. In light of the new algorithm update that seems to be on the horizon from Google to further crack down on the usage of doorway pages, I am coming to the Moz community for some desperately needed help. Before I was employed here, the eCommerce director and SEM Manager connected with a vendor that told them basically that they can do a PPC version of SEO for long-tail keywords. This vendor sold them on the idea that they will never compete with our own organic content and can bring in incremental traffic and revenue due to all of this wonderful technology they have that is essentially just a scraper. So for the past three years, this vendor has been creating thousands of doorway pages that are hosted on their own server but our masked as our own pages. They do have a massive index / directory in HTML attached to our website and even upload their own XML site maps to our Google Web Master Tools. So even though they “own” the pages, they masquerade as our own organic pages. So what we have today is thousands upon thousands of product and category pages that are essentially built dynamically and regurgitated through their scraper / platform, whatever. ALL of these pages are incredibly thin in content and it’s beyond me how Panda has not exterminated them. ALL of these pages are built entirely for search engines, to the point that you would feel like the year was 1998. All of these pages are incredibly over- optimized with spam that really is equivalent to just stuffing in a ton of meta keywords. (like I said – 1998) Almost ALL of these scraped doorway pages cause an incredible amount of duplicate content issues even though the “account rep” swears up and down to the SEM Manager (who oversees all paid programs) that they do not. Many of the pages use other shady tactics such as meta refresh style bait and switching. For example: The page title in the SERP shows as: Personalized Watch Boxes When you click the SERP and land on the doorway page the title changes to: Personalized Wrist Watches. Not one actual watch box is listed. They are ALL simply the most god awful pages in terms of UX that you will ever come across BUT because of the sheer volume of this pages spammed deep within the site, they create revenue just playing the odds game. Executives LOVE revenue. Also, one of this vendor’s tactics when our budget spend is reduced for this program is to randomly pull a certain amount of their pages and return numerous 404 server errors until spend bumps back up. This causes a massive nightmare for me. I can go on and on but I think you get where I am going. I have spent a year and half campaigning to get rid of this black-hat vendor and I am finally right on the brink of making it happen. The only problem is, it will be almost impossible to not drop in revenue for quite some time when these pages are pulled. Even though I have helped create several organic pages and product categories that will pick-up the slack when these are pulled, it will still be awhile before the dust settles and stabilizes. I am going to stop here because I can write a novel and the millions of issues I have with this vendor and what they have done. I know this was a very long and open-ended essay of this problem I have presented to you guys in the Moz community and I apologize and would love to clarify anything I can. My actual questions would be: Has anyone gone through a similar situation as this or have experience dealing with a vendor that employs this type of black-hat tactic? Is there any advice at all that you can offer me or experiences that you can share that can help be as armed as I can when I eventually convince the higher-ups they need to pull the plug? How can I limit the bleeding and can I even remotely rely on Google LSI to serve my organic pages for the related terms of the pages that are now gone? Thank you guys so much in advance, -Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VBlue1 -
Is guest posting good for main link-building tactic for eCommerce site
Hello, Is guest posting going to be devalued? We've been offering a guest post with one link in the body pointing towards one of our articles, and one home page link in the bio. We're looking at doing this as the main link building strategy. Is this still a good idea now and in the future? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
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