Questionable backlinks...

[Immanuel]

One of our competitors (who are ranking top spot ) have this trend of building backlinks from websites build for the sole purpose of seo. (see example) When you see the website it's just a submission of articles from different companies trying to rank for a certain keyword most of the time poorly written.

Our competitor seems to be doing this a lot...
What do you guys think, is it just a matter of time before Google cracks down on them or is this technique actually working for them? (even though it's rather grey hat) Or... could it be someone trying to build "poor" backlinks to them in an attempt to push them of the Google throne

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Immanuel,

While I can't comment on the site in question and their backlink profile because you haIt ven't shared it, what I can tell you is a bit more information about weekendpost, the site you did share as one of the sites in this company's backlink profile. Looking at a random site with articles built for link building purposes, it is pretty rare that you find a site like this with a PR of 5 in this day and age. Many of these were smacked by Google in the various updates and penalties, with public PR often reduced as a public indication of this site's devaluation. However, the site you shared has a toolbar PR of 5 and a homepage authority of 57, clearly a stronger site than your usual hastily built article spam site.

Looking closer into the history of the site using the Wayback Machine, you can see that this site was once an actual legitimate site and source of weekend news. It started accruing links in 2011, and this is where much of the site's strength comes from. At some point the domain was likely dropped and picked up and converted to an article site for links. Whois further signifies that there was a change in registration of the site with 1 drop.

Do I think Google will eventually catch up with this site and devalue its links if they haven't already? Certainly. But in the short term, links from this site may be boosting up other sites. I don't think this is a good long term solution, but I can see the benefit from links from a strong site (according to metrics at least) like this in the short term.

Mark

[DanielFreedman]

I agree with the above: it's almost certainly just a matter of time before the smackdown comes.

The wait can be frustrating, though.

Been there, done that, waited it out -- and it took almost a year.

In the meantime, just focus on the nuts and bolts of on-page, while building quality content and backlinks.

What else can you do?

If it's any consultation, the smackdown can be huge and sudden. When it finally comes.

[Immanuel]

Thanks for your thoughts on this guys, much appreciated! Here are some other websites used example 1 example 2 example 3 example 4 and there is more...

What are the chances of these websites al being run by the same seo company ?
Some of the articles are so bad i can't believe this stuff is still getting results!
It also looks like majority of the articles are pretty recent or do they just keep changing the dates?

And is there a way to make Google catch on to these sites sooner?

[DanielFreedman]

You could do a whois lookup for clues that the sites are run by the same SEO company (or at least people trying to cover their tracks.) But what's the point?

As a former editor, I can tell just be reading the articles that they were likely written by the same semi-literate person. I'd even speculate the author is not a native English speaker. That said, it's clear the articles were written by a human in some semblance of English.

So it may take Google longer to spot that articles that it would for spun or computer-generated articles.  That said, there are big problems with articles. These include low word counts on  very thin sites. The Google algo is good at catching this -- eventually.

I'm guessing you're in the same situation I was. A competitor hired a sleazy SEO company. The SEO company used three techniques:

• links from article directories
• links from once-legit sites it had acquired and corrupted
• links from sites it had created itself

In all, there were more than 100 links from crappy articles. Eventually all but 3 were devalued. But it took almost a year.

As I said below, there is not  much you can do beyond focussing on what you can control: your own SEO efforts.

You could submit a spam report to Google. But short of criminal misconduct (my rival hacked my site and here is the police report) Google will almost certainly not take individual, manual action against your competitor. It generally looks for abusive patterns and rolls the information into algo updates.

I understand your frustration. But my tough lough advice is:

Stop fretting about what your rival is doing and get down to work on your site.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

You can gather a list of domains and backlinks to this site that you think are spam and influencing this site's rankings unnaturally and then submit a spam report. This can help to speed up the process.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1

[KarlBantleman]

Just a little note to add to the other comments...

Doing backlink analysis on competitors is very tricky nowadays thanks to the disavow tool. For all you know, your competitor has disavowed these links and Google is no longer counting them which would explain why they are still ranking so well.

The example website you supplied is undoubtedly paid for posts and as they are not no-followed, the website is not going to be passing any benefits to those linking from the website.

[Immanuel]

I realise the links might be disavowed but they are very fresh so it looks like recent work. I also think the SEO company put their own details on the first link i supplied... maybe their client doesn't even know this is going on

[Immanuel]

I'm not to worried about the timing of the penalty just rather curious about their strategy and even after all Google's attempts to stamp out this style of SEO it looks like many are still practising it. I think it's interesting to see that sometimes these methods can still deliver results although they are probably juggling a ticking time bomb

[DanielFreedman]

I agree the strategy is ill-conceived. Either it was executed by an incompetent company, or one that is into "churn and burn" tactics. By the time Google catches on,  it will have moved on to the next client.