Creating multiple domains with key phrases and linking back and forth to them

[Ron10]

There are several of my competitors who have built multiple sites with keywords in their domain names such as localaustinplumber.com, houstonplumbers.com, Dallasplumbers.com, localdallasplumbingservices.com...you get the picture.  (These are just made up examples to illustrate what they are doing) They put unique content on each page and use alias whois using a different credit card to set up each domain to hide the fact from Google that they are the same entity and then link back and forth to each of the domains with appropriate keywords in the anchor text.  They are outranking me on a lot of key search phrases due to the fact that they have the keywords in the domain name. They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own.   Is this a good idea?  is it black hat?  are they going to get slapped if someone reports them as a link farm?  It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme.  Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?

Thanks in advance for your opinions!

Ron10

[EGOL]

It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme.

You should be praising God that they are wasting their time with all of this domain buying, credit card charging, alias creating, linking back and forth bullcrap.  When they start doing something really effective you are in big trouble.

They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own.

Are you sure about this?  If they have no links from outside of their own network of sites then links from these domains should be close to zero value.  And, if they do have these links from outside of their own niche they would be more effectively used directed to a smaller number of sites - perhaps only their main site.

Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?

Its a common practice... but there are better methods of ranking highly.

Is this a good idea?

I think its a good idea to sell to your competitor.

(I know that a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this.... that's OK. 

[Ron10]

They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Are you sure about this?

Yes, or at least there are no other links that the mozbar seomoz link analysis shows, but they don't show all links.  Many times it will show no links to a page and then you look up links through the Yahoo links report and will find 20 or 30 links that the mozbar didn't show.  Does the mozbar not crawl as deeply as the Yahoo spider does?

[RyanKent]

Ron,

The tactics your competitors are effective. They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices. If your site offers fantastic content combined with solid SEO, then you can blow your competitors sites off the front page of Google.

Your choices are:

• hire an SEO

• start with the Beginners Guide to SEO and incorporate every learning into your site

• join your competitors on trying to work around the system until one of your competitors steps ups and leaves everyone in the dust

[RyanKent]

Linkscape (SEOmoz tool for crawling links) only includes the top ?30% of web pages and their links. You are not likely to see links to local area plumber sites.

[EGOL]

They can effectively rank better then other sites which do not use proper SEO practices.

This is a very valid point... and at the same time it is good news if you know more effective methods.

[EGOL]

Ryan, do you know if redirected links are visible in Linkscape?  I am guessing that they are not.

[RyanKent]

My Linkscape knowledge comes mostly from a great Help desk response I received from Aaron regarding a question I submitted.

I do not otherwise know the answer to your question.

Aaron Wheeler said:

both Open Site Explorer and the Web App Link Analysis are based on our Linkscape Index of the web. I'm sorry that you haven't been able to see your links in Linkscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. Just so you know, here's how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we've crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of the amount in Google's index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index

We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we've got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

For now, the best thing you can do to help your domain become indexed is to work on link building for links from sites with high mozrank.

[EGOL]

Thank you!