Why Proved Spammers are on 1st Google SERP's Results
-
This question is related exclusively to few proved spammers who have gained 1st Google search results for specific terms in the Greek market, targeting Greek audience.
Why he looks spammer and very suspicious?
For instance, the site epipla-sofa.gr, sofa.gr, fasthosting.gr and greekinternetmarketing.com look suspicious regarding their building link activities:
1. suspicious spiky link growth
2. several links from unrelated content (unrelated blog posts forom other markets, paid links, hidden links)
3. excessive amount of suspicious link placements (forum profiles, blog posts, footer and sidebar links)
4. Greek anchor text with the keyword within articles written in foreign languages (total spam)
5. Unnatural anchor text distribution (too many repetitions)
So the main question is: Why Google is unable to recognize/trace some of these (or even all) obvious spamming tactics and still these spammy sites as shwon below reside on the 1st Google.gr SERPs.
Examples of spam sites according to their link building history:
www.greekinternetmarketing.com
All their links look very similar. They use probably software to build links, or even hack authority sites and leave hidden links (really dont know how they could do that).
Could you please explain or share similar issues? Have you ever found any similar cases in your industry, and how did you tackle it?
We would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter.
Regards,
George
-
For smaller markets especially, this can be infuriating. I would recommend looking at the recent changes and trajectories in markets like Italy, Spain and Portugal that have had these problems but where Google is gradually focussing effort. I think a lot depends on your timescales, but if you are building a business that you want to last, you should be using sustainable tactics IMO.
-
Hello Again & Thanks for your responses.
Well, while there are some generic concepts that you suggest me to follow, such as "quality links", "quality websites", "authority" etc, I don't see the point in them, they're all theory and let me explain why.
If you see google unable to recognize some of the MOST obvious spam tactics, where's the point in talking about "authority" & "quality" links? Some examples:
-
Most of the links come from the footer section of the websites
-
Most of the links come from blog comments and forum profiles
-
Most of the links come from websites with no relation at all with the publisher's website. For instance, the website is talking about furniture, and most of the links come from blog articles that talk about CSS Techniques, Iphone and technology.
-
Several links are stuffed nearby hunders of others links, in sections of the website called "partners" & "friendly websites" (obvious paid links sections)
-
Several Directory links
-
Spiky Link growth "from zero to hero" in 2 weeks
Well, the only thing I can think about Google's failure to recognize this obvious spammy tactics, is that most of the links come from "authority" and high page rank websites. The spammer did a good job recognizing (and buying) "authority" and "trusted" links, that gave him the advantage over the competition.
We have already reported the spammer, however I don't think Google has the resources to solve this kind of issues. Especially when we are not talking about Google.com
-
-
Well the only way to tackle it is to report the site for spamming to google.
However if your real question is how you can duplicate what they have done and whether you will get caught, then you can make a sister site of whatever your site is and use blackhat tactics and see the results. If google slams you at least you wont lose the main site.
-
That's right... don't try to beat someone by mimicking their methods - instead do something superior.
-
If you are competing with this guy, dont replicate what he has done. Prove to google your site is more popular by getting even better quality links. Google wont have a choice but to rank yours if your link profile is more authoritative.
GREG
-
What if I link bombed your website? Every month I pay someone $5 on fiverr.com and buy thousands of super spammy black hat links. Not just your website, the top 5 in the SERP for a certain keyword that I want to get ranked for.
I run a test like this before. Link bombed a website with 15,000+ links, reported to Google but nothing happened so far. It would be too easy for competitors to ruin each other's online reputation with spammy links.
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Bad backlinks is it possible that Google is penalizing me?
Hi guys, since December I'm receiving thousands of bad backlinks from websites that copy my content and content from other websites. I also noticed a drop in the organic visits each month. Is it possible that Google is penalizing me for those backlinks? I know that I can ask the webmaster to remove the links but I don't believe that they will do. Look like it's a robot that does all this automatically. Should I use the Google disavow tool? Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
Check images below please.
Thanks! OjAFwgT mni5lke UPVp9bW0 -
Why Google cached another site, not mine?
Hi Guys, please help me. I need your help regarding my business website i.e. https://www.kamagratablets.com/. Before 8-10 days it was ranked in top 10 from home page but I lost my position and ranking page also changed by Google. If you will check caching of this website then you will see Google cache another site - http://www.hiphoptoptower.com/ - I have checked my code and nothing found related to this website. Please check and help me on this point, how can I remove this site from caching and get my previous ranking in Google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
What is the difference between Positive Impact, No Impact, Negative Impact and Extremely Negative Impact in term of Google Update like panda or penguin etc.
What is the difference between Positive Impact, No Impact, Negative Impact and Extremely Negative Impact in term of Google Update like panda or penguin etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?? If yes then how ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Google Reconsideration Requests no problem... So what do I do next?
Hi all, So I recently filed a Google reconsideration request - but it came back saying "No manual spam actions found" - ok, so that's that. But from what I've read, if we have been hit by Panda for duplicate or thin content, we wouldn't know - in other words, Google does not report it as it is an algorhythm penalty as opposed to a manual one. So what are my options - do I wait until the next Panda update? when can that be? Or do I start over on a fresh domain? Input and views appreciated. thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100