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I'm having trouble getting hotme.ca to rank for anything competitive - I can get it in #1 for "Toronto sex toys", but here you've got a strong local SEO impact, which could easily over-ride a lot of standard organic signals. In most cases, it's not that they're hiding anything in their link profile, but one of a few explanations: (1) Other sites have inflated PA/DA due to spammy links. We've just introduced spam scoring recently, but keep in mind that PA/DA are generally measures of overall ranking strength, and they don't account for quality/spam. In an industry where spammy is common, and especially when you've got tons of sites in the 20s and 30s, these numbers can leave out a lot. (2) We're not crawling a lot of the weaker or lower-quality links. We tend to take a quality-over-quantity approach in MozScape, but if an entire industry relies on low-quality links, Google could be seeing more than we're seeing. (3) Other factors are over-riding these link signals, as Massimiliano says. On-page is definitely one, technical issues is another, and local factors (as I mentioned above). When someone is masking a link profile, what we usually see is that they're 301-redirecting other domains to that domain (and we aren't seeing those links directly). Typically, though we'd see those 301-redirects, and I'm not seeing that for hotme.ca. Truth is, if they are doing something unethical, there's almost nothing you can do about it, unless it's flat-out illegal. In SEO, chasing your competitors bad behavior is almost always a completely waste of time - believe me, I've done it for clients (and it was a colossal waste of time and money). You have to focus on your site and what you can do.