Competitors black-hat link building?
-
Hi Mozzers,
<a>http://www.alivenetwork.com/ </a>is a close competitor of ours. They're ranking far better than us even though many of our search metrics are the same...except one! links!
To give you an idea, we've got a fairly large backlink profile for the industry with quality links.
34,981 links from 276 Root Domains = about 127 links/domain.Alive Network has 1,692,256 links from 705 root domains = about 2400 links/domain.
Surely that looks a bit black-hat right there? Is it just a matter of time until they're penalised? Perhaps they're just a bunch of domain-wide links? Thoughts would be appreciated.
-
You've made some great points here David!
I agree there is no way they built those links last month, that's for sure! And by no means did I mean to imply that waiting around for Google is only course of action. Just figured I'd share the link. It certainly can't hurt!
I like the point you made about risk tolerance. Risk vs Reward is all around us in business. I just feel that it could become a slippery slope in regards to following what we know is not best practices regarding website optimization.
Cheers!!
-
You may be waiting quite a while if you think Google will take care of this on its own. I guarantee they didn't build all those links in the last month, and what just came out 1 month ago? A Penguin refresh. And if they're still outranking you, it probably didn't hurt them.
Why don't you try the same tactics they're using? Obviously you should be more discreet about it, but it's clearly working for them and could work for you as well. Don't get stuck in that false mindset of white hat vs. black hat, there is no such thing. There are only levels of risk tolerance, just like in a million other aspects of business. Decide how much risk you're willing to take then build links appropriately.
-
If it is like that, google will catch them and drop them far away from the ranking.
I recommend you to do this:
Google your most important keywords.
Grab all the top 10 pages in the ranking.
Check the balance of the traffic using semrush.com, if you can see any big drop from traffic could be they have been penalised. In this case avoid them. If they have normal balance, go to https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ and check their backlinks.
Download your csv report.
Now choose the most important ones (with DA &PA) and try to replicate them.
Remind has to look natural, so you must go slowly.This way you dont have to wait the results of the first site.
Good luck.
-
OSE is telling me there are 1,200 links that are almost exclusively directory submissions. I imagine we'll see them drop out fairly soon?
-
Hmm... I feel like this scenario is all too familiar.
Have you tried reporting their site to Google? If not, I'd recommend doing so. This "may" prompt a manual review of their site and get them out of your way!
Best of luck on this!!
#TEAMNOSPAM
-
They have grown a lot since October. Can be seen from the growth curve. It seems that some tactics are wearing, if they have cheated we will see in a few months. Otherwise you could use opensiteexplorer.org to copy their strategy and replicate their backlinks.
-
Except that the bad links may have been disavowed in their GWMT.
-
They look like a bunch of directory links really...I'd be extremely surprised if it was possible for them to naturally build these links, they're a small-medium company.
Let's just wait and see to watch them drop out of the rankings then!
-
Hi
Have you analysed their link profile to see if it is indeed suspicious looking websites linking to it? Open site explorer is perfect for this.
If it is links which Google would consider bad it will only be a matter of time before they are caught. No one can beat the algorithms!
Regards
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
-
Link Building
I have a question as competitor made backlinks on longtail keywords and just for one specific post, If I wanna rank in Google SERP, then should I have to do the same strategy as my competitor did. or can I use just my own keywords to get rank?
Link Building | | aamirmurtaza670 -
Good Collaboration resources for link building
We have recently come across this site in our work on a website: https://collabosaurus.com We are wondering if there are any other collaborative tools or sites like this that may be effective for partnering or matching with people for link building purposes. If anyone is aware of anything similar, we'd love to hear about it. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Gavo1 -
Backlinks vs External Links vs Referral Links vs Outbound links
Hello all, I was just wondering if you could explain the difference between all the links above? I'm confused as they all seem to be the same or similar and I would just like to clearly know what distinguishes them from eachother. Thanks for your help, Jayne
Link Building | | NCOREGSEO0 -
Setting up a separate site for link building
We are jump starting a link building campaign for a personal injury law firm. We're planning on doing things right with earning links to content people will actually want to share, sponsoring local events, etc. We're a little worried that some good opportunities could be missed due to the fact some people have assumptions about personal injury lawyers and would be hesitant to link to us simply because of our injury, regardless of what we're trying to share/promote. One solution we're considering is creating a foundation associated with the firm that supports relevant causes and provides the public with educational resources. That might get over our branding hurdle a bit. We've also discussed setting up a separate site for the foundation and actually building links to it rather than our main site, then linking the foundation site to our main site. The hope would be that we could get more links to the foundation site and it would in turn pass on link juice to our main site. My concern is whether this strategy makes any sense. We'd be putting good content on this foundation site rather than our main site. How much link juice would actually be passed on to our main site in this case? Would so much be lost that it would negate the whole purpose?
Link Building | | LeeAbrahamson1 -
How much should a link building program cost?
Hi All, I am relatively new to the world of SEO but it is vital to our business that we improve in this area. I believe our site architecture is good although we have a new site coming in the next few weeks which is effectively a re-skinning of the existing one that makes the user experience more relevant. What I would like to know is how much a link building program shoudl cost from an SEO provider and how they quantify what they charge - is there some kind of indicative cost per link or is it just "give us some money and we will do our best?" We have started writing daily articles on our news site and our natural listings are already pretty good. What I am looking to achieve is top three status for the London area (where we work) accross a broad range of keywords. I know this is what everyone wants but we are already front page and top 3 for many keywords and the back link building would appear to be where we are weaker compared to some of our competitors. Thanks James www.morganpryce.co.uk
Link Building | | Jcoveyduck0 -
Link building for eCommerce
I have an engraving site where I am looking to increase traffic/ sales. We do local engraving services and sell engraved products via eCommerce. Perfectindesign.com It seems to me that locally I can't compete since most search terms are washed over with every local directory in and around the city that are selling there memberships. So I thought I could compete nationally via the 200 products we carry. I have used site explorer to go through my competitors links. My findings show that other then their twitter accounts and dmoz listing most everything else are paid links and lots of them. Keeping in mind I have 45 root domains with 411 links to my site. Three competitors links data. I probably shouldn't name them right? competitor #1 1k root with 13.9k links competitor # 2 147 root with 16k links competitor # 3 427 root with 28k Should I just start buying these links that range from $10-50 per link or is this a waste of time? Are these truly my competitors or am I comparing my tiny site to the major leagues?
Link Building | | YYV0 -
SEOmoz's ranking of links on competitor question..
I am Perplexed about SEOmoz crawl for new links on a competitors website. When I looked at a company who received very high ranks for the links...on SEOMoz...such as. 95, 96, 97 etc..... I couldn't figure out how they ranked so high. One company bought 20 links for a couple hundred dollars and all of them were ranked very high on SEOmoz but when I used the page rank tool on them individually they were either "0" or "1" and none were over a 2. I was debating submitting for those since I am just starting out and wanted to get our name listed in the internet world. Are the high rankings by SEOmoz related to something else? Would I be better off buying a listing in some of the premium directories instead. Like Yahoo or BBB or Manta. ( After I get my site optimized first) Thank you, Greg
Link Building | | Boodreaux0 -
Does Seomoz Help Me Identify The Most Linked Articles From My Competitor Site
Does Seomoz Help Me Identify The Most Linked Articles From My Competitor Site -- Is there a feature to help me sort the results by this parameter I would like to set ?
Link Building | | helpwanted0