This Guy Is Turning SEO Upside Down

[Springboks]

Hi,

Everything my competitor does goes against everything I have learned about SEO so far. For starters:

1. he registered a brand NEW domain and within a space of **4 months and ** has a top ranking for one of the most competitive search terms on Google.

2. he uses scraped content

3. the navigation is almost non-existent.

4. his backlinks seem dodgy. 1-page sites with content that doesn not relate. Bunch of links to other websites too

And yet his site stats are as follows:

• Domain Authority: 72

• MozRank: 4.63 MozTrust: 4.72

• Linking Root Domains: 1725

On further investigation I discoverd that he owns a SEO company and that they in fact have achieved a #1 rank in various niches such as life insurance, car insurance, mortgage etc.

On his SEO site he actually promises a #1 ranking in less than 4 months. The sample sites he lists on there all achieved #1 over a 4 month period...of course he owns most of these domains and then just sells the leads...

So, my question is how on earth does he do it? Do you have any ideas

Zane

[PeterAlexLeigh]

I've seen some other South African sites like this that have ranked really well. In fact our brand name is a big term is South Africa, hence the reason I noticed the odd .za site appearing in the rankings. I'm not sure if the algorithm is different for the area and that's why it works??

To be completely honest with you, what you competitor has done may not be sustainable in the long term, but you can see he's got some easy links from 'high ranking pages'. I won't endorse it and sooner or later he may get a penalty, but he does seem to have found some easy wins for the moment at least!!

[RyanKent]

Some analysis for this site:

• any site will receive a significant boost for the exact domain name match phrase. This site owner is using a South African ccTLD, org.za for his domain name. He added "lifeinsurance" as the domain name which will earn him a boost in rankings for that term.

• His home page is 100% targeted to the "life insurance" phrase. His page title, H1 tag, H2 tag, and alt text all use the term.

• the content uses the term enough to be very relevant for the phrase.

• the site has 45 internal followed links, 0 external links. The links are highly efficient. While it is true the site does not offer any navigation in the header, it forces users to scroll to the bottom of the page where 100% of the links are located, in the footer. As long as users are ok with this method, there is nothing wrong with it. The footer seems quite spammy to me, and I would expect Panda to hurt this site a lot, but I don't think Panda has reached South Africa yet. If anyone can confirm the Panda status in SA, that would be helpful

• the best backlinks are from other sites which he owns such as www.lifeinsurance.org.za which has the identical look and feel. There are also sites he works with such as www.fastcompany.com where the link appears on the profile page of the "Chairperson" of the company.

• many other links are from blogs which don't add the "nofollow" tag to comments. First, these sites are not related to life insurance, so the linking value is minimized. The first such site I noticed is destructoid.com which is a gaming site. There are tons of others trying the same method so the links are highly diluted with over 500 links on the page. I have to believe that Google has some awareness to this type of issue and catches many of these links and wipes out their value. They could algorithmically investigate the site receiving these types of links and remove other links as well.

So in the end, what does your competitor offer? An exact match domain name with very solid on-page SEO. That is enough to earn good rankings. Combine it with a smaller market (South Africa) and the backlinks from his other sites which have solid PA/DA and he has earned his ranking.

You can collect as many FACTS as possible and share them with Google. Share the information about his network of sites demonstrating they clearly use the identical web template. Demonstrate the spam blog links. Report the site and hope some action is taken.

With the exception of the blog spam and duplicate sites, I would suggest copying some of his other tactics as there is nothing black hat about them.

[AdoptionHelp]

According to OSE his page authority is built up by finding blogs without rel=nofollow in their comment section and spamming his keywords in the links on hundreds of blog comments.

Frankly I'm surprised this is working so well.

[Springboks]

Okay, that makes sense.

[RyanKent]

Is there any reason your competitor's site information cannot be shared openly in this Q&A? Without looking at the site, we are left to offer general feedback which clearly wont be as helpful.

[Springboks]

I agree, but how do you compete? For example, he gets links from so-called 'authority' sites such as http://www.multicrawl.com/ with a Page Authority of 64 (PR 6)

And sites such as http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.db.html where I can't even find his links on the page??

[calindaniel]

This type of SEO drives me crazy and it's one of the aspects of SEO that makes me want to pull my hair out. Typically you see "SEO" companies that participant in awful, obviously black hat SEO and they rank quickly and for a long time. A white hat SEO tries to build quality links but it's near impossible to dislodge these websites when faced with the overwhelming value provided from these spammy websites.

I'd be happy to take a look at the website's backlink profile as well (PM Me). I recently came up against a massive link pyramid that I had to compete against and I know how frustrating it can be.

[Springboks]

Ryan, I'll be PM his details to you

[AdoptionHelp]

I don't know if I can offer any insight, but if you provide a link its more likely.