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
-
Competitor Keywords
Is there any way to find out what keywords my competitors are ranking for? I would like ideas for blogs, website content, etc. to drive traffic and am curious as to what topics my competitors are focusing on. I am able to see my competitors' rankings for keywords which I am currently tracking but I would like to see keywords they are ranking for that I am not tracking if possible. Any suggestions? Josh
Competitive Research | | jbeals0 -
Sudden and dramatic decrease in External Followed Links and Total External Links
I'm not sure how or why this has happened but from a span of a week my client's site went from 518 total external links to 97. I also saw a dramatic decrease in traffic for that week as well. I'm new to the SEO game but I have not made any changes to their content other than importing old blog posts that did not get migrated to their new host. Any thoughts? www.cobbcountyattorneys.com Thanks! JC
Competitive Research | | cyrjm0 -
How to understand a site's current ranking
I know this is basic stuff, so sorry for the beginners post... I offer primarily web design services, and I need to know when taking on a new client, how can I assess the current 'lay of the land' for their site in terms of their SEO? I have had some issues in the past where launching a new design negatively affected their performance for their keywords, and obviously I would like to avoid this in future without having to go to 3rd parties. In particular I have an issue where the client themselves are very bad at giving information about what keywords they currently rank for, and what SEO activities they may have done in the past. How can I make these assessments myself? thanks for any help p
Competitive Research | | panamandm0 -
Why is my competitor's site ranking #1?
I'm about to work for a local business website that offers cleaning services and products. The keyword they want the most is ruled by a very odd site; My client's competitor's site has been around for 7 years. (Less than the average of it's competitors. Less than my client's) Has 1 backlink. Lower PA MR MT & DA than any other in the SERP. It's a 1 page site made with Flash. They do not have FB or Twitter accounts. So I thought maybe they were ranking so well because of their traffic. But neither my client, me or my coworkers have ever heard of this company. And yet, they are ranking #1. And the only thing I notice that might have helped is that the title of their page is the exact keyword and nothing more. Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | Eblan0 -
Problem Adding a competitor
I am having a problem adding a competitor at one of my campaigns... I am not sure if I should add the link of my competitor so I wont 🙂 the link is with a /path competitorlink.gr/magazine Anyone knows what should I do?
Competitive Research | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Two links with the same quality but different effect
Hi, the website I'm working for is loosing rankings for one specific keyword and since there haven't been any bigger onsite changes I assume it's the back links. The company bought some exact anchor text links in the past, so I went through those. One specific one attracted my attention: It's a site wide link which creates over 80% of the back link profile to the specific website. There was only one catch: part of this bought anchor text campaign is another highly targeted anchor text which is not negatively affected by the rankings. Still I didn't like the feel of this so I ran the seomoz keyword difficulty report. And there I discovered an interesting pattern: For keyword A we are the only ones in the top10 with such a high percentage of exact keyword usage. But for keyword B, which didn't loose rankings our top10 competitor have an even more over-optimized keyword usage or much weaker back link profile. So now I wonder if it could actually be the case, that we loose rankings for keyword A since our competitors have a more natural profile, but for Keyword B it has no negative effect due to the worse competition. Thanks in advance for your help!
Competitive Research | | RomiSverige0 -
Best Link Analysis Tool?
Now that the Yahoo Site Explorer is not usable on sites unless they are in your Bing Webmaster Tools, what is the best tool out there to see an accurate list of inbound links to a site? Google tools are still pretty unreliable from what I can see...
Competitive Research | | Bandicoot0 -
What's the best way to make sure a link is worth getting?
I know what tools to use and I use all of SEOmoz's tools daily. PA, DA, MR, & MT are all things I take into account, but sometimes all you have to do is look at a site and you can tell it's not worth it. I'll analyze the page's backlink's and everything in between. Are there any tricks out there that can help the decision making process? I'm tired of trying to get links on sites that clearly are not worth it, but all of their stats say otherwise. So do you stick with stats, or is it a judgement call? I'm particularly curious about determining the amount of possible traffic from a link. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MichaelWeisbaum0