Competitors with duplicate sites for backlinks

[JustinBSLW]

Hello all,

In the last few months, my company has seen some keywords we historically rank well for fall off the first page, and there are a couple competitors that have appeared that use backlinks from seemingly the same site. For fairness, our site has slow page load speeds that we are working on changing, as well as not being mobile friendly yet. The sites that are ranking are mobile friendly and load fast, but we have heaps of other words still ranking well, and I'm more curious about this methodology.

For example, these two pages:

http://whiteboards.com.au/
http://www.glasswhiteboards.com.au/

In OSE, glasswhiteboards has the majority of links from whiteboards, and the content between the sites is the same. My page has higher domain authority & page authority, but less backlinks. However, if you take away the backlinks from the duplicate site, they are the same. Isn't this type of content supposed to be flagged? My question is about whether this kind of similar site on different domains is a good idea to build links, as all my research shows that it's poor in the long run, but it seems to be working with these guys.

Another group of sites that has been killing us uses this same method, with multiple sites that look the same that all link to each other to build up backlinks. These sites do have different content. It seems instead of building different categories within their own site, they have purchased multiple domains that act as their categories. Here's just a few:

http://www.lockablenoticeboards.com.au/
http://www.snapperframes.com/
http://www.snapperdisplay.com.au/
http://www.light-box.com.au/
http://www.a-frame-signs.com.au/
http://www.posterhangers.com.au/

[JustinBSLW]

Yeah the second batch of sites I listed have been around, or at least displacing our pages, since probably July of last year. I'm waiting for them to be penalised and disappear, but they've recently updated their layout with a responsive design and seem to still be going strong.

[JordanLowry]

I would not recommend doing what they are doing. Some of those category sites they have linking around have very high spam scores according to Moz's spam analysis in opensite explorer. Im not sure how long they have been around but I am sure they will probably incur some sort of penalty at some point.

I would focus on increasing technical factors within your site such as the page load speed and making it mobile friendly for the user.