Competitor Inbound Links Increase from 175K to 1 million in 1 month, how?

[mstpeter]

Hi all,

I was recently doing some competitive analysis on external links/DA and came across something peculiar. A competitor of ours had their external links go from 175,179 in August to 1,141,365 in September. I've attached a screenshot showing the increase. The competitors domain authority also increased from 82 to 89 in the same time span. Has anyone else come across such a large link increase in such a short period of time, while also being rewarded for it? Obviously at first glance it seemed extremely black hat and unnatural, but I would love to be proven wrong.

Thanks!

Cw5tN

[Alick300]

Hi Matt,

They are certainly using some black techniques to get backlinks otherwise it is not possible to get such number of backlinks. Google sometime miss but Google will penalize that website when they caught. After penguin 4.0 I assume they will caught soon.

If you want you can report Google about this by filling this form @ https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Well, what happened with: innocent until proven guilty ;). Because what could have happened here:

• Open Site Explorer found more links in their niche/industry so they just found more links in there area.
• They have started a partnership with a site that is linking to them from hundreds of thousands of pages. Have been there done that and then usually this happens. It's Links, not referring root domains what we're looking at in the end.

Some ideas to identify if this is really the more black hat kind of stuff, identify patterns:

• Look at their changes in follow/nofollow links so you get some sense if there links are bought or not.
• Look at what kind of anchor texts they're using. If the majority of links is still with their brand name anchor text then they might have done link buying or whatever crappy tactic but at least not focused on a certain keyword. If they're dumb they did it for specific keywords they want to rank for.
• Look at other competitors in their industry, do they see a similar trend.
• Have they done any other outreach/PR stunts in the past that suddenly got them tons of new links?

All of this might give you a better sense into if this is shitty black hat or that it's a valid tactic.

[PenaltyHammer]

This can be pretty easy to do:

• they could do few 301 redirect from domains with many inbound links

• they could place sitewide footer links on websites with many pages indexed

I don't believe it's a blackhat in 100% but I'm 100% it's not good in long term. Also DA increased so links come from high DA domains too. However high DA doesn't guarantee links are good for seo and always safe.