Central Perk: How your competitors may be outranking you with black-hat SEO techniques

sâmbătă, 29 martie 2014

How your competitors may be outranking you with black-hat SEO techniques

Posted: 28 Mar 2014 06:12 AM PDT

Black-hat SEO has been around as long as search engines, and many of the SEO techniques that were previously seen as white-hat and used by many, have gradually moved through the grey area to black-hat.

While many of these techniques are now likely to cause you more harm than good, it's frustrating to still see sites benefitting from old school black-hat tricks in a post-panda/penguin era.

Comment Spam and Track/pingback

This is something that we are all familiar with – you write a blog post and get lots of attention from people saying how useful they found it, only to find that their name appears as a suspicious keyword and they have added a link back to an unrelated website. It then becomes clear that the sole motivation for making the comment was for the link.

But the worst part about this is that, despite this form of spam being the main reason for Google to release the no 'nofollow' tag (which prevents any value from being passed through links), comment spam still appears to be working as well as ever.

Some examples

In the case below, the offending site ranks on page one for the term 'Karen Millen Outlet' – a brand that often has results removed after complaints are filed under the US digital Millennium Copyright Act. The exact same comment appears in over 560 posts:

I found that many of the spam links appearing on various blogs included terms such as "Louis Vuitton bags" and "Hermes Outlet". So, I did a quick search for "Hermes Outlet" and found this page ranking at number 3 http://chrisweaver.co.nz/hermes-bags-outlet-online-5179.asp. This page is pretty horrible, with a huge amount of keyword stuffing and a very poor design. It doesn't appear to have been live for long and has 566 backlinks that were built in the last 9 weeks, almost all of which are through comment spam.

While many of the linked sites above are no longer live, it's surprising how many of them do rank for the linked terms. For example, one site – sellyourcatsdirect.com ranks on page one for the linked term 'sell used catalytic converter'. Catalytic converters contain precious metals, so this industry is big business and black-hatters are cashing in.

HR Software

One particular area that I found has adopted this kind of spam is the HR software industry. For example, if you search “Pingback: HR Software” you will find hundreds of unrelated blog posts containing hundreds of spam links that point to a number of sites that succeed in ranking in the top positions for the term “HR Software”.

The same goes for spam comments. I searched “HR Software Says” “reply” (based on the format of a blog comment) and quickly found posts containing comments with exact match anchor text links to the same HR websites.

Payday Loans

Next, I looked at one of the most competitive keywords in search – 'Payday loans'. The number 1 & 2 organic results were: http://www.ocics.co.uk/ and gayhomestays.co.uk/

After clicking both of these results, I was presented with the same content, branded as 'Monkey Payday Loan' on different domains (although gayhomestays.co.uk/ redirects to http://www.discopaydayloans.co.uk/)

So, at this point, any users that aren't paying much attention believe they have landed on a website called 'Monkey Payday Loan'. After entering their details and clicking 'Get Cash', they are redirected to the real site – https://www.monkeypaydayloan.co.uk/ (which does not appear in Google's index), then after filling in your personal details you are redirected again to the loan provider via a referral link, so visits are tracked and commission is paid.

However, after checking again a day later, these sites were no longer ranking and had been completely removed from Google's index. I did some further searching and found that http://www.ocics.co.uk/ was previously 'The Oxford/Cambridge International Chronicles Symposium', and still has links from several Universities, which would no doubt have helped it to rank, based on their high authority.

I also found several other domains with the same 'Monkey Payday Loan' content, for example www.autovana.net, so I'm expecting this site to make a brief appearance in the same space in the not too distant future.

This is hardly a long-term strategy, but such a highly searched term is likely to generate thousands of pounds a day, so I'm quite sure that the spamming will go on!

To summarise

While this type of link building is still helping many sites to rank, it's only a matter of time before they are caught out, so we would never recommend making it part of your SEO strategy.

If you make genuine comments on industry related blogs that include real comments from others, then add a link back to your site (avoid messing around with the anchor text), but stay away from sites that accept suspicious looking comments.

If you're concerned that one (or more) of your competitors is taking part in black-hat activities, there are ways to report them to Google – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport although this isn't necessarily going to work, so don't expect them to be penalised instantly.