Hey there, i'm working on search results in dutch.

[ValleyofTea]

My biggest competitor who's number 1 in main keywords in google has almost only links from 'linkfarms' and blog comments. How is he ranked that high? Would it be a good idea to add a bit the best of these in my mix, while i work on the real good quality content?

[seomozinator]

Hello, my friend.

I have noticed the same thing happening to our website and our clients' websites. As you said, we see lots of bad/spammy links to our competitors and they rank high (not always higher though). Well, I asked this question here: https://moz.com/community/q/spammy-backlinks-are-working

After reading all that + just using common sense +  a bit of hope for intelligence of Google updates, I just didn't have enough guts to risk the rankings we achieved so far and reputation of the domain.

So, as it's said in responses in that discussion, if you're willing to see your website get messed up in case everything goes south, you're more than welcome. Just write a case study/research after that for curious minds like me

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Wouter,

I would say that you don't want to be following in what they are doing. There might be other reasons why they are doing so well, but without seeing the site, it is almost impossible to say why.

Perhaps their content is considered exceptionally good - perhaps they have a few non-spammy links that are really high quality? - Perhaps they have more trust gained from Google?

Remember that Google will ignore a lot of the spammy links from directories and blog comments. Look past the links if you want to see what is going on as there may be something else.

-Andy

[ValleyofTea]

Thank you, i did miss that!

[ValleyofTea]

Could be! Its just when i use moz, to discover there best links some high quality 'link pages' come up. They do have a couple of others pretty good links could be that i quess. Would doing 2-3 guest posts be okay?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Welcome to Dutch link building, overall the quality of links is way lower than the averages in other countries. In some cases the low quality links are still seen as more high quality. We've still got some very popular link farms/ directories that in any other country would directly end up in your disavow file.

[MattRoney]

As long as those guest posts are well-placed on respected, topical sites, that could help. You just have to make sure your contributions to those sites are genuinely relevant to their audiences.