City and state link stuffing in footer
-
A competitor has links to every state in the U.S., every county in our state and nearby states, and every city in those nearby states. All with corresponding link text and titles that lead to pages with thin, duplicate content. They consistently rank high in the SERPS and have for years. What gives--I mean, isn't this something that should get you penalized?
-
Thanks for your response, Will. It's small business (maybe 10 or 12 employees) at a single location. While they don't really impact me directly, it's particularly bothersome because they are in the advertising and marketing business. We tell clients not to do these things, but all around there are agencies that succeed using these tactics.
-
Hi There!
Unfortunately, as both Ben and Pau are mentioning, this absurd practice is still hanging around the web. While it's very unlikely the stuffed footer is actually helping this competitor to achieve high rankings, it is aggravating to think it isn't preventing them, either.
Your post doesn't mention whether this is actually a business model with physical local offices or is fully virtual, but what I have seen in cases like these is that big brands tend to get away with a great deal of stuff I would never recommend to a smaller brand. It begs the question: how can we explain this phenomenon?
In the past, I've seen folks asserting that Google is soft on big brands. There could be some truth in this, but we've all seen Google take a massive whack at big brand practices with various updates, so that really makes this an unsatisfying assertion.
Another guess is that big brands have built enough supporting authority to make them appear immune to the consequences of bad practices. In other words, they've achieved a level of power in the SERPs (via thousands of links, mentions, reviews, reams of content, etc.) that enables them to overcome minor penalties from bad practices. This could be closer to the truth, but again, isn't fully satisfactory.
And, finally, there's the concept of Google being somewhat asleep at the wheel when it comes to enforcing guidelines and standards, and whether or not that's kind of excusable given the size of the Internet. They can't catch everything. I can see this in this light, but at the same time, don't consider Google to have taken a proactive stance on accepting public reporting of bad practices. Rather, they take the approach of releasing periodic updates which are supposed to algorithmically detect foul play and penalize or filter it. Google is very tied to the ideas of big data and machine intelligence. So far, it's been an interesting journey with Google on this, but it is what has lead to cases exactly like the one you're seeing - with something egregiously unhelpful to human users being allowed to sit apparently unpunished on a website that outranks you, even when you are trying to play a fairer game by the rules.
In cases like this, your only real option is to hang onto the hope that your competitor will be the subject of an update, at some point in the future, that will lessen the rewards they are receiving in the face of bad practices. Until then, it's heads down, working hard on what you can do, with a rigorous focus on what you can control.
-
I've seen a lot of websites that do similar things and rank high on SERP's...
Sometimes this can be explained in some part by a good backlink profile, old domain / website, high amount of content (if the content is relatively original and varied), or because the niche is more receptive to this type of content (when it's something relatively common on your niche)... and other times simply makes no sense why things like this are working in Google for years without getting automatically or manual penalyzed.
Iv'e seen webs with so big keyword stuffing repeating a keyword about 500 times in the homepage, and being ranked in the top of Google for that keyword without seeing nothing internal or external of that website appart of this that can explain that awesome ranking. It's so frustrating knowing that this is penalized by Google and some of your competitors are doing it with impunity while you can't or at least you shouldn't...
-
Hi!
Yes, this absolutely should get them penalized. Unfortunately, I have also seen this work very well for different competitors in various niches. Regardless of what Google says, some old black-hat tactics still work wonders and these sites often fly under the radar. For how long is the question though. It still carries a heavy risk. If they are discovered, they can get a serious penalty slapped on them or at the very least get pushed pretty far down the SERPS. It's really just risk vs. reward. If you are like me, I work for a company that has a ton of revenue at stake, so I think of it like this.
It is much easier for me to explain to them why these thin, low-quality sites are ranking because of a loophole than it would be for me to explain why I got our #1 lead generating channel penalized and blasted into purgatory.
Usually, these sites that use these exact-match anchors on local terms look like garbage. So even if they are driving traffic, I often wonder how much of it is actually converting since the majority of their site looks like a collection of crappy doorway pages. It is still very frustrating to watch them succeed in serps though. I have the same issue.
You could always "try" to report them to Google directly. I do not know if this really works or if anchor-text spam would fall under one of their official categories to file it under, but you could try submitting a spam report here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.
I have no idea if this works or not though. Also as a side note, I would run their site through a tool like Majestic SEO or AHREFS and really dig on their backlink profile. I have seen a couple of instances where some spammy sites pulled off some nice links, so their success could also be attributed to those as well.
Hopefully, this helps, I know your pain.
-Ben
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
-
We´re in trouble with our on site internal link optimization - please help
Dear Moz community, We have made a great mistake. Looking at keyword search volumes somehow Moz showed volumes for two keywords which only differentiate by an '**s (plural) as same. **Now we optimized our internal links (all links have the keyword) for the singular word. Now looking at other search volume estimations from competitors we see, that the plural has 5 times bigger volume. Our issue: If we change some of the category links now to another keyword, we will loose our ranking with the singular word. Correct? If we do not change any of our internal links, we will never rank in top 6 with the keyword. (currently singular is 6 and plural is 15) What would you reccomend?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Theme create category page stuffed with Keyword
Hi All, Quick question and I think I already know the answer but wanted to get a second opinion. We have a ecom site running woo commerce and the theme is coded to insert the product category name under the product name on the category page. This has resulted in the category page being stuffed with my keyword 'sofa beds'. Am I right in thinking that in the eyes of Google this page will be penalised for over use of my keyword or does Google view category pages differently? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-S0 -
Internal link question
Hello, I was wondering if internal links should be full urls? for instance my coder might put "page-title.html" but I was wondering if its better for seo to have it be the full url "http://www.blah-blah.com/page-title.html" thanks in advance..... I love this place!
On-Page Optimization | | Superflys1 -
Too Many On-Page Links, Can You HELP???
This is the best architecture I found to help my visitors find there furnace filter size. Does it hurt my SEO? Index page has, 210 links and most other pages has, 190 links. Thank you, BigBlaze
On-Page Optimization | | BigBlaze2050 -
Anyone know of a tool to monitor site for outgoing links?
Is there any type of tool that can monitor a large website's outgoing links? I'm dealing with a huge site and was hoping there was something available that could check outgoing links without having to go through each page manually. (I'm looking to remove anything that links to a bad neighborhood). Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | cakelady0 -
Footer-links (navigation)
I want to put navigation links in my footer. I watched the (distilled) whiteboard friday video saying it can be a penalty. How are links in the footer different from links in the navigation. Why don't you get "hit" for putting the word "Real Estate Listings" in the navigation menu? It appears on every one of the 30k pages. I don't get why the links in the footer would have a negative effect if the links in the navigation don't. My example is a real estate website. When people are browsing properties (30k), it is convenient that at the end of the page there is a navigation of areas. I could put the navigation on the sidebar but that would be in essence, the same thing. A wordpress site would dynamically include that sidebar on every page.
On-Page Optimization | | JML11790 -
Site wide 301 or canonical links.
Hi guys, I'd like add code to my header file to specify www. as opposed to just http:// for the canonical links across my entire site. How can I do this? I'd like it to be site wide code that I can just add to my header.php file which is included across the site.
On-Page Optimization | | absoauto0 -
Linking within Secondary Site
So we've got a secondary site that has quite a bit of authority & links that used to have all types of info on parasailing. All those pages are gone and homepage is now a salespage (management decision, not mine) Our main site sells a wide range of tours and activities and does have a page for parasailing. The secondary site uses the same template/navigation as our main site (again, not my decision). Do you think that's an effective way to send link juice to our main site? The secondary site has some pretty awesome high authority sites linking to it. I've considered 301'ing the whole site to our main site but it's got a really solid domain name and I'd like to take up 2 SERP listings (main and secondary site) Is there a better way to have double listings but still send a good amount of link juice?
On-Page Optimization | | SoulSurfer80