Welcome to the Q&A Forum

One of the more successful competitors in my niche has embarked on new strategy that seems to be working well for him. I noticed that many new links began to appear to my site from my competitor's stable of many websites.

It appears that he has setup a link wheel to benefit a site that has been in the top Google position for several months now.  The rim of the wheel links back to authority sites, including my own main site (established 7 years, now hanging on to the lowly 10th place on the serp).  So the strategy seems to be: a) create a dozen sites that no-follow link back to authority sites including competitors, b) place links in a such a manner (bottom of page, uncolored links, from images) that a customer is unlikely to ever click on it, c.) do-follow to your own site and blast it to the top of Google.

I don't think this competitor is worried about getting penalized. I've been watching this for years. When one site gets burned, he just shifts things around and brings up another one of his sites. He seems to age them for years, calling them up one by one as they are needed.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a trend?  Because it sure seems to work. He's crowded the front page now with 4 of his sites.

Would it be appropriate for me to "disavow" his links? Would it matter?

If you noindex the page it will eventually be removed, but not immediately.

Why just remove it manually from Google from GWT, and also block it in your robots.txt file?

Ok, thanks. That's what I thought. I'll file a webspam report and see what happens. Won't hold my breath though.   Not the first tricky thing these guys have done, and won't be the last I'm sure.

Link wasn't hot, but I fixed that. It's working for me now. Thanks for your comments.

A competitor recently jumped very high in the SERPS after adding Ratings markup schema to his site. His site shows in the serps with a 5 star rating for a software product.

Here's his site: http://bit.ly/11hp2KX

The source of the "rating" appears just to be hard coded schema markup, not connected to anything external or impartial.It appears at this point that Google is taking this markup data at face value, and maybe is giving it some authorityHave you seen this kind of abuse in your vertical?

I appreciate the synopsis and the good feedback.

In our case, we feel that we have a very strong ability to guide users to the site of our choice.  Local seems like a misfire for a global software company.

Since there doesn't seem to be a loud consensus that we should be working with any specific site at the moment, I think we'll send reviewers to BBB, since customers sometimes tell us that is an important trust signal for them.

Really great links. Thanks!

I'm still getting great results from several EMD's that have very good content on them and which are updated regularly. My EMD's also do very well with Bing/Yahoo, who seem rank this signal higher.

I think you'd be ok if you found a unique purpose for the domains and put excellent content on them. In our case, we have some software products that solve some broad problems, but also several niche problems.  We used the EMD's to focus the product content like a laser on the niche.

Google doesn't like EMD's with spammy content, but thankfully it still likes great unique content.

There is a plethora of choice today for aggregating customer reviews. BBB wants to collect ratings from our customers; there a commercial options that put me in more control; yelp wants to rate me locally.  Google...

Given that I have some ability to steer customers toward my preferred review site, which one should I use?  From an SEO perspective, have you noticed whether some these sites carry more weight or credibility than others?

I realize it may depend on the type of business we are. In this case I represent a software company and their customers are USA/global, rather than local.

This happened to me, too. Google has been finding these links since last October, and I just keep adding the domains to my Disavow list. My rank has slipped a bit (from 2 to 4) but its hard to know if these thinks are the reason. Probably not.

When the links were first pointed at my site, Google moved me from 2nd to 1st place for my top keywords. The bad links seemed to give me about a one week a temporary boost, before we settled back to 2nd .

Google HAS to be aware of this. Their silence on this issue is deafening. Cutts gave it a little bit of lip service; but there must be tens of millions of these junk links being added daily judging from all of the people selling 100k bad links on Fiverr for five bucks.

So far I'm mostly annoyed by these bad links, rather than hurt by them.This has really screwed up all the intense work I did to scrutinize and analyze my link profile.

A nice feature for SEOmoz would be to allow us to UPLOAD our DISAVOW list so we can get some of our reports with the junk scrubbed out. After all, if I tell Google to ignore these 1,000 links and presuming they actually do ignore them, then it would be more useful to get SEOmoz reports with that data removed as well.

You know what, Ausaf, one of my sites was in a similar situation.  In April it tanked, and there was no warnings from Google and no obvious reason for the fall. No deathly hallows links to my site that I could find. It may be that certain sites that were providing you juice were devalued by Google, and caused your drop. Quality link building might help.

I tried everything I could think of for 2 months, tried to get questionable sites to unlink, added new content, fixed a few minor html errors, and nothing budged it. The site just seem to fall further.    In mid June I just started a new site with a well chosen domain name, rewrote the content, carefully built a broad variety of new links... and voila!  I'm back on page 1 (result #3 currently). I was previously #1, but I tell you after 4 months of this I'm glad to be on page 1.

Sometimes its good just to start over if you're able to.

I know that 2 months is nothing in SEO time, but when you're running a business it's an eternity. I couldn't afford to wait around a year and hope.  If the other site comes back, great. If not, we have plan B.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

I spent about 5 hours yesterday picking out bad links from good, and sent them to Google through their disavow tool.

I wondered how this could happen (I guess I live in Candy Land) and it took me about 2 minutes to find people on Fiverr selling 25,000 "bad links" for $5.  That's scary, and it seems Google has wrought this with Penguin. I can't work this hard everytime someone wants to spend $5.

My hope is that my site withstands the attack. So far so good, really, but it sure is annoying when you're trying hard to clean things up and do the right thing going forward.

Maybe Google should offer a Disavow Query tool, whereby you could tell it if certain queries are misdirecting traffic to your site. That way I could let them know at the front end that my site has nothing to do with "free sex."