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Hi Mozzers,

<a>http://www.alivenetwork.com/ </a>is a close competitor of ours. They're ranking far better than us even though many of our search metrics are the same...except one! links!

To give you an idea, we've got a fairly large backlink profile for the industry with quality links.
34,981 links from 276 Root Domains = about 127 links/domain.

Alive Network has 1,692,256 links from 705 root domains = about 2400 links/domain.

Surely that looks a bit black-hat right there? Is it just a matter of time until they're penalised? Perhaps they're just a bunch of domain-wide links? Thoughts would be appreciated.

I'm not so sure.

Common sense tells me that pages without any Page Authority, or those that may have been penalised (or indeed not indexed) for having spammy, thin content, etc will only pass these **negative **signals on through a 301 redirect?

Also surely if there is as many as 250 potential landing pages all redirecting (maybe even to one single URL), it'd surely raise alarm bells for a crawler?