Competitors links increasing rapidly

[tomhall90]

Hi there,

I have 3 main competitors who I keep my eye on within Moz and I am always comparing pages as they are all sell similar products in the same way but we're increasingly getting more things put in place to make ourselves different, which is why we rank number 1 in the UK for their competitive keywords (without blowing my own trumpet!).

One thing I have noticed, a competitor seems to be doing things the old school way. He has around 15 competitive keywords in his pages meta tag (irrelevant) and then has a huge 400 - 500 word description on each page describing whats on the page, what products are in that category (if it's a category page) or localised information if it's a company page.

What seems to be odd, is that before penguin/panda their website had around 1,200,000 total links. Then after panda, he went down to around 300,000 total links.

In the past few weeks I've noticed that he has gradually increased in total links from 300,000(estimate) to now 961,811 total links in a matter of weeks.

Is this an error/glitch within Moz or is he doing something that may be classed as "blackhat" or is it something I shouldn't really be worrying about?

Any feedback appreciated

Tom

[PaddyDisplays]

check his "Link Anchor Text" via OSE, see how natural the back links are (he might be using a lot of anchor text in these new links)

You could also use "Just-Discovered" in OSE, to see what he is up to.

If hes buying links and breaking penguin rules I wouldn't be that worried,  but it is always worrying when you see a competitor start to seo stuff, some day he might start doing it right

[tomhall90]

Very eye opening stuff in there! It seems he is linked with lots of spammy "false" blogs made to look like human generated blog posts but are exactly the same content wise across several "joe bloggs" websites just giving a review on a product they happened to buy from this company.

Very interesting... Looks like my years of doing things by the book will eventually pay off if he carrys on like this and gets himself a nice penalty from Google

Thank you!