How to dismantle a link building scheme?

[willthefrench]

My team performs SEO only in the real estate space. While doing some research recently we came across a semi-elaborate link building scheme by one of our competitors.

This SEO firm built a dummy real estate resource site with lots of general content, nofollow links to brands (e.g. NYT, Fannie Mae etc.) for validation and links for high-valued keywords pointing to their clients' sites. Basically the whole site is a clever front to help their clients rank. Still, it seems to be working for them (at least for now), which I'm guessing is due to lack of strong competition and the site being quite old. Oh, and they also charge to become "affiliates" on the site, i.e. paid links disguised as non-paid.

I reported the scheme via the Search Console. Anything else we could do? Have any of you had experience dealing with this kind of link scheming before? Any guidance is appreciated.

Thank you!

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, you can't really report them. I mean you can, but it won't help. Basically, you are trying to report a normal website with nofollow (read no spam) links, with some information (as long as it's not autogenerated, read not spammy content). So, what I'm trying to say is as long as that website doesn't perform any spammy actions like generated content, bunch of follow links and such, it wouldn't matter what the "real" purpose of the website is.

A non-spammy website, which functions, looks, being updated from time to time will not be considered spammy, just because it helps your competitors.

I hope this makes sense

[willthefrench]

Thanks for the quick answer Dmitri. Apologies, my question was worded poorly.

The nofollow links are only to known brands. Links to their clients are follow. So they charge clients (and whoever else is willing to pay) to get follow links. Isn't that textbook black hat?

[DmitriiK]

I understand Google is saying that they take action on paid links. But, there is no way really for them to find that out, is there? (unless it's explicitly said so somewhere on the website).

About follow links - if correlation between follow/nofollow is "good" - let's say only 5-10% of all outgoing links are follow, then it's not gonna be considered spammy, cause it's quite natural.

Hope this helps.