Yeah, essentially what I'm doing is moving www.blog.com to www.othersite.com/blog in order to give othersite.com the blog's google juice.

Are reverse proxies that much better than 301 redirects? Should I invest the time in doing this? I found out about reverse proxies here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

Actually, they're pretty easy to copy. Just a bunch of open blog posts and forum profile spam.

Yep. Direct message. I'll send you one now.

Thanks for the advice. I do have to say, all the spammy blog comment links are surrounded by like 200 others spammy links to other sites. Very rarely are they there all by themselves, except for when they've joined a forum to put a link in their profile page.

You willing to DM? Unsure if I want to publicly share URLs.

I know the usuals about creating valuable content. We've done that. That's how we've gotten where we are.

And actually, I can see in open site explorer which of the links are follow vs. nofollow. That's what I'm saying... they're very, very good at this. They've built literally hundreds of back links on random blogs with open commenting and follow links.

This is exactly the question I'm asking: I KNOW this is spammy link building, but I'm in the position of asking, since I can't beat them, why not join them?

Widgets.com was a generic example of our site. I didn't mean our site is literally Widgets.com. It was an analogy.

Forgive the newbie question, but now that I have found SeoMoz and OpenSiteExplorer, should I just piggy back on my competitors backlinks? What would be the downside?

By way of explanation, I've never had the need to explore SEO before. Our site, Widgets.com has always ranked highly for all Widgets keywords because we have the keyword in our domain and our site has been around since 1998.

But out of the blue this summer, a site, let's call them WidgetsCircus.com suddenly began outranking us on widgets keywords, and pretty much every keyword we can imagine in our little widget universe.

Now that I have run OpenSiteExplorer, I can see how they've done it. They've pretty much spent the last year commenting on blog posts all over the place, editing wiki pages, etc., and built thousands of links for all these widget keywords.

So, I'm wondering: why shouldn't I just go down the list of links and do exactly what they've done? Where they commented on a blog, why don't I just comment right along side them. Obviously, this has worked for them! Wouldn't it work for us too?

Or is that too simple?

I know the usuals about creating valuable content. We've done that. That's how we've gotten where we are.

And actually, I can see in open site explorer which of the links are follow vs. nofollow. That's what I'm saying... they're very, very good at this. They've built literally hundreds of back links on random blogs with open commenting and follow links.

This is exactly the question I'm asking: I KNOW this is spammy link building, but I'm in the position of asking, since I can't beat them, why not join them?