Backlinks on sites that aren't relevant, how does google determine relevancy?

[Deacyde]

I have a competitor who I've talked about on here before about how they passed us in ranking for our main keywords and that they were a new site ( less than 6 months old ).

Well after further digging a few things were found out:

• Our site seems to have a penguin penalty causing our keywords ( a group of synonyms as well ) from ranking better than rank 30.
• As well our competitor has been using this weird backlink tactic of using SEO sites ( a friend? ), a parent site to prop it up ( footer links and others ) as well has links inside articles that aren't relevant as in having a commercial niche page inside a lawyer site page talking about phone dialing. Then the low DA directory sites.

I'm curious as to if penguin algo will catch them once it comes out, if not penguin a manual review would certainly catch their tactics, but this site is doing everything else other than proper SEO.

What do you think?

[GlobeRunner]

As SEOs who are trying to do linking the "right way" by getting on-topic, relevant links, it's frustrating for us to see sites rank that don't seem to "deserve" to rank because they have so many off-topic, low quality links. We really hope that Googles' penguin update will fix this--but I don't have high hopes.

All we can do is continue to look for and obtain high quality, on-topic links--and report spam to Google when we come across any link networks or link spam. If you see a weird link tactic or link network, Google does have a way to report it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

[BradsDeals]

First, when you say you have a Penguin penalty, are you talking about a manual penalty where you got a message from Google in your GSC account? If not, it's not really a penalty so much as it's just how the algorithm currently affects you. I'm not just being pedantic here about how as SEOs we often label things as penalties when they're not. How you approach a penalty is very different from how you approach an algorithmically bad ranking.

Second, we can speculate that the upcoming Penguin update might be better at catching crappy links like the ones you described, but no one can say for sure. Sometimes updates live up to the hype, and sometimes they don't. I think we all have our fingers crossed, though.

[Deacyde]

Thank you both of you for the replies.

I try to report as I find them, but will be even more vigilant now about it.

As for Rebecca's questions: It's a algorithmic bad ranking penalty, still call it a penalty since it's penalizing us and reason I think it's penguin is the site in question has traffic patterns that best fit a site suffering from panda and penguin issues. Panda is part of the core algo and hasn't recovered from a single keyword and it's synonyms ranking better than page 5. Penguin is the only algo left that corresponds to the traffic being lost as far back as April 2012. Other reason I say it's penguin is the client's backlink profile is horrid, over 20% follow links are that keyword or synonym anchor text to crap sites, if that's not the trigger for the penguin issue then I'm getting results from doing the wrong things.

Both our redesign and link cleanup have directly increased keyword ranking however every increase that happens isn't passed page 5, I've seen it one page 4 before but only for a day, nothing longer. So it seems to be able to rank higher but is kicked back almost right away faster than it increased. Really seems like it's being " adjusted " after going passed page 5.