Competitor is interlinking between his websites

[andzon]

I have a competitor who ranks in the first page for all his keywords and i found out in open site explorer that he has been interlinking between websites and it is obvious because he owns the same domain but different countries. for example,

www.example.id (indonesia)

www.example.my (malaysia)

www.example.sg (singapore)

(asian countries domain)

my question here is this even consider "white hat"?

I read one of the blog post from moz and here is the quote

"#7 - Uniqueness of Source + Target

The engines have a number of ways to judge and predict ownership and relationships between websites. These can include (but are certainly not limited to):

A large number of shared, reciprocated links
Domain registration data
Shared hosting IP address or IP address C-blocks
Public acquisition/relationship information
Publicized marketing agreements that can be machine-read and interpreted

If the engines determine that a pre-existing relationship of some kind could inhibit the "editorial" quality of a link passing between two sites, they may choose to discount or even ignore these. Anecdotal evidence that links shared between "networks" of websites pass little value (particularly the classic SEO strategy of "sitewide" links) is one point many in the organic search field point to on this topic."

will interlinking between your sites will be ignored by google in the future? is this a time bomb method or it is fine doing so? Because as far as concern my competitor is actually ranking on the first page for quite some time.

[Er_Maqui]

I think, this links are neccesary. Do not forget the main reason: You need to tell your users you have this page. And they doesn't know it if you doesn't have a link.

Different one it's if google ignores the link, but i do not think who they can be a timed bomb. As i've told, these links are neccesary.

For example, if you have your page in two languages on two domains, you have the link to the another lang in the another domain. That's black hat seo? I do not think so.

[andzon]

so how is this different from a person who own 10 blogs and interlink between the blogs? i know that way is wrong and how is that different from this? just because the person own the same domain name?

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

The answer here is always very subjective. It is perfectly natural for businesses to link their sites together. Why would you not do that? Google understands this; the relationship between businesses owned by the same entity can and should be partially represented by links. Moz links to Open Site Explorer's website. Amazon.co.uk can link to Amazon.fr. If I link my blog to a website promoting consulting services, this is natural and fine.

What Google and other search engines want to figure out and discount is if you create a huge network of websites, attempt to obscure the fact that they are all owned by you, and link them together in some pattern that attempts to increase the SEO value or all or some of them. That's manipulative and you can't expect such a tactic to work in the long term. Effectively hiding a network like this is usually costly and time-consuming and barely worth the effort in the end (although some folks still do it very well).

Google likely doesn't pass the highest amount of authority between links where the linking sites are clearly owned by the same person or company, but there is nothing "wrong" with interlinking the sites you own.

Your competitor is likely ranking well due to a number of factors, not just because their websites are linked together.