Chris, that's true. Most of these blackhat techniques work temporarily but that doesn't seem to pose an issue since the blackhatters can put together a new site within hours. Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in joining them. I'm just trying to figure out how can a whitehatter ever succeed in a market that's filled with blackhat techniques.

I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so.

How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total.

As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords.

I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this?

Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful.

I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!

Matthew, much appreciated.

Thankfully I don't need to worry about redirects since it's just a transition to a new template. About 90% of the other elements will remain intact.

Checking webmaster tools after the transition sounds really helpful.

ps. Thanks to everyone for your great responses!

Thanks for the detailed answer. This, in itself, could make a great article

After reviewing the items you mentioned, I actually realized some of the things I had neglected.

Apparently after transferring all the content to the demo website, some of the elements had changed, including: date of the posts, H tags, Authors, and few of the meta tags. So glad I caught your response in time to fix those issues.

For the most part, the new site is an improved version of the current site so if the rankings drop, I'll be surprised.

After I make the transition, I'll let you know the results. Hopefully this could make a good case scenario for the community.

Thanks again!

Howard

Hi - I am planning to redesign my blog and I was wondering if this will affect my rankings?

The new website template (custom designed) is much more user and seo friendly. The content, url structure, internal linking structure, meta tags, and site structure will remain exactly the same, but the visual design will be different (new sidebar widgets, and slightly different layout on inner pages).

The current website is ranking very well (mostly top 5), has a healthy backlink profile, strong social media presence, and great traffic.

I have heard that switching to a new template will dramatically hurt the rankings. Is this true? Are there any exceptions? Any ways I can prevent the rankings from dropping?

Would really appreciate your input. Thanks in advance.

Howard