Creating multiple domains with key phrases and linking back and forth to them
-
There are several of my competitors who have built multiple sites with keywords in their domain names such as localaustinplumber.com, houstonplumbers.com, Dallasplumbers.com, localdallasplumbingservices.com...you get the picture. (These are just made up examples to illustrate what they are doing) They put unique content on each page and use alias whois using a different credit card to set up each domain to hide the fact from Google that they are the same entity and then link back and forth to each of the domains with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. They are outranking me on a lot of key search phrases due to the fact that they have the keywords in the domain name. They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Is this a good idea? is it black hat? are they going to get slapped if someone reports them as a link farm? It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme. Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?
Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Ron10
-
Thank you!
-
My Linkscape knowledge comes mostly from a great Help desk response I received from Aaron regarding a question I submitted.
I do not otherwise know the answer to your question.
Aaron Wheeler said:
both Open Site Explorer and the Web App Link Analysis are based on our Linkscape Index of the web. I'm sorry that you haven't been able to see your links in Linkscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. Just so you know, here's how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we've crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of the amount in Google's index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index
We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we've got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule
Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.
For now, the best thing you can do to help your domain become indexed is to work on link building for links from sites with high mozrank.
-
Ryan, do you know if redirected links are visible in Linkscape? I am guessing that they are not.
-
They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices.
This is a very valid point... and at the same time it is good news if you know more effective methods.
-
Linkscape (SEOmoz tool for crawling links) only includes the top ?30% of web pages and their links. You are not likely to see links to local area plumber sites.
-
Ron,
The tactics your competitors are effective. They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices. If your site offers fantastic content combined with solid SEO, then you can blow your competitors sites off the front page of Google.
Your choices are:
-
hire an SEO
-
start with the Beginners Guide to SEO and incorporate every learning into your site
-
join your competitors on trying to work around the system until one of your competitors steps ups and leaves everyone in the dust
-
-
They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Are you sure about this?
Yes, or at least there are no other links that the mozbar seomoz link analysis shows, but they don't show all links. Many times it will show no links to a page and then you look up links through the Yahoo links report and will find 20 or 30 links that the mozbar didn't show. Does the mozbar not crawl as deeply as the Yahoo spider does?
-
It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme.
You should be praising God that they are wasting their time with all of this domain buying, credit card charging, alias creating, linking back and forth bullcrap. When they start doing something really effective you are in big trouble.
They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own.
Are you sure about this? If they have no links from outside of their own network of sites then links from these domains should be close to zero value. And, if they do have these links from outside of their own niche they would be more effectively used directed to a smaller number of sites - perhaps only their main site.
Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?
Its a common practice... but there are better methods of ranking highly.
Is this a good idea?
I think its a good idea to sell to your competitor.
(I know that a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this.... that's OK.
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
-
Are links on a press page considered "reciprocal linking"?
Hi, We have a press page with a list of links to the articles that have mentioned us (most of which also have a link to our website). Is there any SEO impact with this approach? Does Google consider these reciprocal links? And if so, would making the links on the press page 'nofollow' solve the issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mikekeeper0 -
Competition Link Metrics Analysis - Do you have any suggestions ?
My sub-pages are ranking well, but Homepage isn't ranking well for the keywords I'd like it to. It used to in the past. My site - njhypnotherapy.com used to rank (#2-5) 1st page in google for many keywords. In Sep/Oct I noticed my homepage ranking drop dramatically for the main keywords. Well, I made some foolish decisions and I'm trying to clean up the mess. Low quality links, duplicate content...etc I rewrote most of the content, removed unnecessary pages, removed as many low quality links, and used disavow for the rest. It's been a 2 Weeks now. I noticed a lot of improvements in my sub-pages. From #50 to #20. Not Bad. My homepage still isn't ranking. Any suggestions to improve? Btw, I've included my link metrics below if it helps 🙂 Thank You metricks.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | njhypnotherapy0 -
Someone has built low quality links to my site - what should I do?
Hey guys, I was wondering whether you could offer me some help on something. One of the site's I'm working on has a blog attached to it and we sometimes accept guest posts from authors. A month or so back we published a blog that has been attracting a number of low-quality backlinks. Having looked into the matter further, it turned out that the client who had created the guest post was doing something called "tiered link building" and was building crappy links to their guest post content on other websites. I have subsequently deleted the blog post in question - will this devalue/cancel out the inbound links pointing to the original URL? Or do I need to do something extra? Disavow even? Comments appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Domain name for seo
Lets say that my competitor has the domain name and website called remotecontrolcar.com , .net and .org . And he has great links and good white hat google juice. What if I get MyRemoteControlCar.com , .net, and .org domain name.. Would my domain name help me in rank against him as long as I have similar google juice? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zsyed0 -
What means a back door link. Please explain and I will give you credit
Some one is asking me to do a back door link to each other, what dose it mean?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Manage two domains with Webmaster tools
Dear all, I want to create an additional domain in order to: Rank better for a very specific keyword with an exact match domain (I already ask about that, but I did not have my ideas clear at the time); Offer to the user usefull infomation about the topic, without duplicating the content I have in my main domain, just additional and very specific information; Use this domain as landing page, offering a tutorial on "how to" use a specific section of my main domain, including a video tutorial; Link to the related section of my main domain. So, the main idea is, if an user type in google "this specific keyword of ours", they will have in the results "thisspecifickeywordofus.es", they will click and go to the site, where they will find unique and specific information, complementing what I have in my mainsite, and showing how to use my site, so trying to use it for conversion. I want to do only white hat SEO, so first at all, I would like to ask you if you think it is a good idea. The keyword is difficult to rank for, and if I can take advantage of this exact match domain (even if it is nowdays no more so big an advantage), would be great. Second, do you see any problem in managing different domains from the same google account? Newbee question, sorry. Thanks in advance for your help, Daniel
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | te_c0 -
Product Reviews – Link Building Strategy
I own Simply Bags and have been sending sample bags to bloggers as a link building strategy. The following four links are a sample of recent product reviews. http://bit.ly/Mk6Z1t http://bit.ly/Mk6Smq http://bit.ly/Mk7atN http://bit.ly/Mk7wR8 Product reviews were considered a good link building strategy. After Panda & Penguin is Product Reviews still a good strategy? Please comment on the quality of the four sample links. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b4tv
Bob Shirilla0 -
Possibly a dumb question - 301 from a banned domain to new domain with NEW content
I was wondering if banned domains pass any page rank, link love, etc. My domain got banned and I AM working to get it unbanned, but in the mean time, would buying a new domain, and creating NEW content that DOES adhere to the google quality guidelines, help at all? Would this force an 'auto-evaluation' or 're-evaluation' of the site by google? or would the new domain simply have ZERO effect from the 301 unless that old domain got into google's good graces again.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0