Spam Link Building Discovered - What would you do?

[Chemometec]

Hi Mozers,

After investigating our no 1 competitor we have discovered their 87k back links comparing to ours 1k. After dipper investigations we discovered that all the back links are gained by the websites created by themselves.

So what they did is - they had purchased 10+ domains and created 10+ new websites that are identical as their original .com version. EVERY SINGLE LINK on these 'new' websites link to their .com version. The 'New' websites are not indexed.

Literally each of us can do the same and gain thousands of back links, but isn't it violating google's policy?

What are your thought on it?

(What is the best practice to report the violation of google's policy to Google?)

Best regards,

Lana

[Chemometec]

Thank you for your time Egol. According to Moz our website is outranking my competitor's website in all other metrics other than total external links. Hope we will outrank them on google as well

And thank you Josh and Highland for sharing your thoughts, it was really helpful.

[Highland]

I always remind people that Black Hat techniques like this can succeed in the short term but seldom produce the desired result in the long term. Google has a small army of highly paid smart people who want to catch things like this (see Panda, Penguin, etc). When Google does catch this (assuming they haven't already) they will almost certainly face some sort of penalty.

My bet is they're spending the newness of their sites on this technique (a new site has no rank but no penalties either). It probably gives some initial boost until Google catches on with their slower systems (Panda and Penguin are both slow in refreshing). A spam report to Google might draw a manual penalty to the main site but, as Egol said, this is a lot of wasted time and effort on their part.

[EGOL]

I am more amused than bothered by competitors who do this.  Those "manufactured websites" do not have any links into them from other legitimate sites, so they have no link power to pass to the competitor's main site.   This activity has zero benefit in my opinion.  If these competitors have good rankings, I believe that it must come from other things that they are doing.

I hope that all of my competitors spend at least 50% of their development budgets on this activity.  I have no fear of it.  In addition to being a waste of their time, I think that doing this can damage their main website's ability to rank.

[Chemometec]

Thank you for the respond Egol,

Right, but original .com version is not deindexed (!?) and that is the issue at the first place. They are manufacturing links and it works for a long time now. Their .com website still ranks high.

As you have said 'Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time' - killing ONE of those pages or sites is not sufficient enough. What about the original page/site which still ranks? Nobody cares for their duplicate websites being deindexed.

Than you have said 'In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.' - well, the one website which ranks is all they need :). If 'sometimes' will be damaged, than it still means that it is OK to manufacture links by duplicating website, and take the risk to 'maybe' become deindexed.

Theoretically every website owner can create duplicate websites and manufacture tons of back links. It makes the white hat link building pointless. If you ask me this is very much violating google's policy and they should be reported. Otherwise, why don't all of us do the same!?

It is irritating to see someone acting spammy getting better rankings...

[EGOL]

"Manufactured links" on "duplicate websites" have been discounted by Google for at least 15 years.   If you build an identical website and link from Identical Page A to Identical Page B, Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time.  In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.

If these people were competing against me, I would enjoy seeing them buy a few more domains and put time into tossing up identical sites.  No need to report them.  Google has deindexed these "New" websites.