My competitor isn't being penalized? What Gives?!

[bioworld]

This post is deleted!

[Devin_Anderson]

Hi Phillip, I think I can answer your question..

Firstly, their sites are not _technically _duplicates. From a human's point of view, yes, they are incredibly similar, and most of the pages are saying essentially the same thing. But from a robot's point of view, they are different.

The copy on each page is slightly different - different words, different arrangements of words. Crawlers are incapable of critical reasoning, so they can't see that these pages are very similar. Therefore as far as Google is concerned these are a bunch of separate websites about 'septic tank treatment' which all link to NewTechBio.

What your competitor has essentially done in a roundabout way is built a bunch of highly relevant links to their site. These links would be quite valuable because they are from websites that are related to NewTechBio by theme (they're all about septic tank treatment).

I also wouldn't worry too much about their spammy link profile. Something that looks spammy to you or me may well look legit to Google (much like the above), and Google generally doesn't penalise for having spam links anyway. Worst they'll usually do is devalue those links.

[Modbargains]

Following ethical white hat practices against a non white hat is a sure way of fail. There aren't that many stories of how white hat prevails,and if they do it's usually on a non-competitive keyword like toilet seat covers.

Sadly, in a high competitive market on the good old wild wild web, you do have to step out of what a community deems "ethical" and go into what works. Fight fire with fire is all I can say. PM if you want some suggestions.