Is this a clear sign that one of our competitors is doing some serious black-hat SEO?

[Kibin]

One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to?

They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related?

Wh10b97

[MikeRoberts]

That alone doesn't prove much of anything other than that they had a massive increase in links. It could be due to spammy link building... or it could actually be a legitimate increase. Personally my first assumption would be black hat but you need more data than just that. Do they do any social or blogging or something? Maybe they recently posted something that garnered a lot of attention. They may have created good linkbait for the first time ever. Maybe they were in the news for something or a popular website mentioned them in a post that lead to shares & links.

If it is all spammy, they'll get hit soon enough.

[Kibin]

Thanks, Mike... that's what I figured: probably spammy but _might_be legit. They're pretty old-school, but they do have a social presence and some (pretty terrible) content.

Being familiar with them from simply being involved in the industry and my own due diligence, I'm almost 100% certain this has got to be black hat.

Any thoughts on the traffic data? Take a look at their compete data... that's a pretty huge drop back in May-June 2012. I'm wondering if it was due to them getting hit by a Google update for doing the same thing that they are (most likely) doing now.

DVEbgWR

[NakulGoyal]

It's not possible to use that information alone and say for sure that those reasons are connected. They very well may be, or absolutely not.

The links could be a variety of reasons. What if they acquired another big company and did a 301 from the old to the new. Could be the tool you used for the backlinks data crawled more. It could be organic links. It could be something that went viral. There are too many things that could happen. So without digging into the details, I can't say anything for sure.

Look at fresh web links and see what you see there. If you are concerned about that competitor, download their backlinks from OSE and audit them.

[Navolutions]

Why not just open up their link data (on the Moz toolbar) and take a look at where they're getting these links from?