My competitor's sneaky link building technique
-
Hi,
I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page. If you view her page source and type "/about" for example, it shows five examples of the text linking to her "about" page. But four of them can't be located on the web page (they are hidden). How does she do this? She basically has four duplicate links that are counted for SEO but can't be seen on the webpage.
address: http:// camilla peffer.com. au/
Any ideas?
-
As I understand it, Google only counts a link the first time it encounters it on a page, so if she's linking to the About page 5x from the same page, then only the first one counts and the other four are ignored. So I'm not sure I see the point in hiding those four other links unless it was somehow accidental or she's getting some really bad advice somewhere.
-
Yeah, I just figured it out as you replied. Thanks for the follow up.
-
adding the nav in to separate div and hid it accordingly... this is simple any developer will be able to do that!
But again, my recommendation is not to try this at all!!
-
Thanks for the answers EGOL and Moosa.
Moosa, out of interest, how is she doing it? I will take your advice and not worry about it. But how can she have four nav menus that aren't displayed on the website?
-
How is she hiding this is an easy part but if I would be at her place I won’t do that and this is because Google don’t like displaying different page to user and a different version to search engine bot. To me this is kind of gray hat.
If she is ranking at the moment she might not rank for a longer period of time and you will see a drop soon (may be in the next update).
I will highly recommend displaying the same version of the page to users as well as to search engine bots this way you become more transparent and you will see Google will lift up your rankings…soon!
Let’s wait and hope the Google to do justice a little sooner J.
Hope this helps!
-
Nah... I bet a month's pay that isn't it.
-
Argh.. I know, but that it is the reason she is no.1 in Google... double my links with half the page size. It's such an unfair advantage..
-
I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page.
Putting invisible stuff into your pages is not a good idea. Google is well known for slappin' people down if they have stuff in their code that is not shown to visitors.
So, time spent trying to figure out "how your competitor is doing this" is better spent just chucklin' about it and getting straight back to the work of making a good website.
I rarely look at my competitors' code. I might do that for about ten seconds per year. I don't have enough time to make all of the content that I need. Its best to spend time on that.
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
-
Missing tab in Competitor research Template
The template provided in https://moz.com/blog/competitor-analysis-for-seo is missing the 'Audit Data' Tab. Can you please update it or share the Original Template
Competitive Research | | AnkitaDwivedi3 -
Ahrefs Much Higher Than Competitors But Competitors Doing Significantly More Traffic?
Hey guys, I'm baffled by checking my Ahrefs ratings lately. It looks like our rating just went up considerably... from over 1 million to now around 500k. One of my main competitors, however, has a much lower Ahrefs rank (over 3 million) but he does a considerable more amount of traffic than we do... how is this? My domain rating is higher than his by a lot. Very curious how this works.
Competitive Research | | jfishe19880 -
Competitor ranks high, but how?
On our campaign, I have three local competitors which I like to keep an eye on. Two have been around for years but the other is pretty new. According to Moz, he has a Domain Authority of 1, has no backlinks and ranks lower on every keyword I keep track of. How then is he getting ahead of us for certain search terms? Can Moz not give any more information?
Competitive Research | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
Link juice from links that are not on the page?
Hello, Thank you in advance for your help! I was doing research for backlinking opportunities by looking at competitor backlinks using Open Site Explorer and I ran into a puzzle. When I do an Open Site Explorer search for http://whatsdavedoing.com/ I find that link equity is being passed to the site from a number of pages on the http://www.travelsupermarket.com/ blog with the anchor text "What's Dave Doing" When I go to these pages and do a source code search I cannot find this anchor text. When I do a google search with the following: site:travelsupermarket.com "What's Dave Doing" I find that there are tons of items that come back with a list of blogs in their description: "Dec 5, 2013 - ... foXnoMad · Inside The Travel Lab · itravelnet · The Mad Traveler Blog · The Mad Traveler Online · Uncornered Market · What's Dave Doing?" Where is this coming from? What is going on here? Is this a linking tactic that sites use to pass link juice to contributors without linking to them directly? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!
Competitive Research | | overlandundersea0 -
Competitive Link building
Hi Folks According to Site Explorer this link ... www.quotationspage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12032&p=98500 .... has a page Authority of 42 and a domain Authority of 87. Looking at this it seems to be 3 links embedded in a forum comment. What I would love to understand is... how valuable is this link? (Especially with Panda and Penguin?) ... How do i decide if I should also peruse a similar link for my site? Thank you in advance
Competitive Research | | PHD0 -
Are aboutus.org links good?
Greetings Mozzers, I've posted several clients on aboutus.org sometime ago and it doesn't look like it is showing up on OSE. Its been well over 5 weeks. I have looked on their profile and none of the links are rel="nofollow" is there another thing I can check that would take all the juice away from them? Or does someone know if this is a good place to use? Thanks for any advice and clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Competitor Traffic
Is there any way to know what a competitors traffic is? My website seems to be continuously falling despite attempts to fix and just curious if it's us or an industry issue? Thanks in advance
Competitive Research | | Professor0 -
Important link building question for me!
Hi, When building backlinks how important is the location of where the website resides? For example, if I was targeting a search term in Google UK, will link building from websites hosted on UK servers have a higher positive impact on rankings then building links from websites hosted on US servers? Lets say in the above UK hosted is better, what if you have 2 websites hosted in the UK but one with .com and one with .co.uk, I take it from a domain point of view the .co.uk will have a better impact on SERP's then the .com. Now looking at the above from a more wider scale lets say I have the following: A .co.uk website aimed at a search term in Google UK. Example: 1. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the US with .com extension. 2. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the UK with .co.uk extension. Is it a FACT that number 2 will 100% be more beneficial in UK rankings? Cheers
Competitive Research | | activitysuper1