How to dismantle a link building scheme?
-
My team performs SEO only in the real estate space. While doing some research recently we came across a semi-elaborate link building scheme by one of our competitors.
This SEO firm built a dummy real estate resource site with lots of general content, nofollow links to brands (e.g. NYT, Fannie Mae etc.) for validation and links for high-valued keywords pointing to their clients' sites. Basically the whole site is a clever front to help their clients rank. Still, it seems to be working for them (at least for now), which I'm guessing is due to lack of strong competition and the site being quite old. Oh, and they also charge to become "affiliates" on the site, i.e. paid links disguised as non-paid.
I reported the scheme via the Search Console. Anything else we could do? Have any of you had experience dealing with this kind of link scheming before? Any guidance is appreciated.
Thank you!
-
I understand Google is saying that they take action on paid links. But, there is no way really for them to find that out, is there? (unless it's explicitly said so somewhere on the website).
About follow links - if correlation between follow/nofollow is "good" - let's say only 5-10% of all outgoing links are follow, then it's not gonna be considered spammy, cause it's quite natural.
Hope this helps.
-
Thanks for the quick answer Dmitri. Apologies, my question was worded poorly.
The nofollow links are only to known brands. Links to their clients are follow. So they charge clients (and whoever else is willing to pay) to get follow links. Isn't that textbook black hat?
-
Hi there.
Well, you can't really report them. I mean you can, but it won't help. Basically, you are trying to report a normal website with nofollow (read no spam) links, with some information (as long as it's not autogenerated, read not spammy content). So, what I'm trying to say is as long as that website doesn't perform any spammy actions like generated content, bunch of follow links and such, it wouldn't matter what the "real" purpose of the website is.
A non-spammy website, which functions, looks, being updated from time to time will not be considered spammy, just because it helps your competitors.
I hope this makes sense
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
-
Nofollow for reciprocal links?
Hi, We have reciprocal links with our business partners. Their websites have been listed on our website with "nofollow" links and they link to our website with "nofollow" or "dofollow" links. Is this wrong having reciprocal links? And if they are our partners, "nofollow" or "dofollow" is better? I don't think there will be anymore link juice loss with dofollow links from our website?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Competitor Inbound Links Increase from 175K to 1 million in 1 month, how?
Hi all, I was recently doing some competitive analysis on external links/DA and came across something peculiar. A competitor of ours had their external links go from 175,179 in August to 1,141,365 in September. I've attached a screenshot showing the increase. The competitors domain authority also increased from 82 to 89 in the same time span. Has anyone else come across such a large link increase in such a short period of time, while also being rewarded for it? Obviously at first glance it seemed extremely black hat and unnatural, but I would love to be proven wrong. Thanks! Cw5tN
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mstpeter0 -
Regular links may still
Good day: I understand guest articles are a good way to pass linkjuice and some authors have a link to their website on the "Author Bio" section of the article. These links are usually regular links. However, I noticed that some of these sites (using wordpress) have several SEO plugins with the following settings: Nofollow: Tell search engines not to spider links on this webpage. My question is: If the setting above was activated, I would assume the author's website link would look like a regular link but some other code could still be present in the page (ex, header) that would prevent this regular link from being followed. Therefore, the guest writer would not experience any linkjuice. Any idea if there's a way of being able to see if this scenario is happening? What code would we look for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Audreythenurse0 -
Submitting url to link directories seen as un-natural link building?
Hi I have been a lurker for a long time, so I finally took the step to make my 1st post, and will hopefully start giving back more in the future since I have gained invaluable info from this great site Background I hired a new freelancer on our team of SEO consultants ("specialists") During the course a month he (the new consultant) submitted our website to numerous link directories (he assured me this is good), today I received the report of the work he had been doing for the past 4-weeks. I opened the report and I was furious and wanted to sack him there and then The Problem / My Question He had submitted our website to 150 directories with various levels of page rank, ranging from 7-1. Most of the directories are totally irrelevant to our niche (we are in the catering business) and he had gone and submitted the site to directories such as "finance busters", "questfinder" etc For all 150 submissions he used: exactly the same url exactly the same title exactly the same description exactly the same keywords My Concern Am I right to be worried about this? Or am I completely wrong and may this actually have an effect (even if none)? The way I see it is that Google is seeing 150 duplicate links coming from irrelevant directories all within a months time, which will trigger a red flag and possibly do major damage to my site, which has always been strictly white hat and been doing pretty well. p.s does link directory submissions even count these days anyway? Thanks for reading and advice very much welcome
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | timthetanker0 -
Competitor link profile shocking - yet still out ranking!
Howdy fellow Mozzer's,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TimHolmes
I have been doing some background seo checking on a competitor in my small "insurance niche" to try and see why they have recently shot up the listings and are now consistently out ranking us.
We have quality content on our site and have always taken an approach of trying to be whiter than white when it comes to developing out SEO plans. The site in question has recently moved ahead of us (along with some aggregators e.g. confused.com) possibly due to shifting patterns from possible algorithm changes favouring brand or could it be a case that Google has dropped a ball when it comes to checking back links as the competitors site is 99% linked to link farms, link submission sites, directories and lots of other spammy/poor quality sites. We do not feel they are doing anything from a content stand to justify their sudden propulsion up the ranks. I am reluctant to pursue dodgy tactics to help get out site back in position as I feel it could then contribute and hurt us down the line. Does anyone know how I can combat against their poor QUANTITY over QUALITY banklink profile that is surely helping them at the minute? At a bit of a loss so any help would be greatly appreciated. aRTu4cT0 -
Unnatural inbound links message from Google Webmaster Tools!
Hi Everyone, I just got this message from GWT(image below) This is probably a penguin Penalty. What is clear is I have to find the best and most efficient way to tackle this issue. We will probably lose tons of traffic in the next couple of weeks so I would like to get the best suggestions and maybe a guideline on how to do this in the most effective way! Thank you! 1a0X2M2a1h0A
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Disavow - Broken links
I have a client who dealt with an SEO that created not great links for their site. http://www.golfamigos.co.uk/ When I drilled down in opensiteexplorer there are quite a few links where the sites do not exist anymore - so I thought I could test out Disavow out on them .. maybe just about 6 - then we are building good quality links to try and tackle this problem with a more positive approach. I just wondered what the consensus was?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lauratagdigital0