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Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO

255 points by throwmesomeseo 10y ago

Hey guys - for some time our startup did organic link building and technical seo. We ranked for a year approximately as our closest competitor. Since the end of 2016 he is increasing the number of incoming links massively by adding bridge sites. These have keyword heavy domains and keyword heavy content with all links pointing to their site. Contrary to seo consultants opinions we've ask ("don't worry") this (for all I know) works for them. They have now left us quite behind in rankings. As we are still not a known b2b marketplace brand and depend on seo this is hurting. Ahrefs/Semrush does not report other large changes in their technical seo or link structure beside this massive buildup of bridge sites. What would you do? We don't want to engage in the same tactics, should we?

marcjohnson1985 10y ago
I'd first check if those "bridge sites" are really black hat or simply a very labour-intensive and effective way for them to increase their SEO efforts. What's the quality of those sites like? Also, sometimes sites have a short-lived improvement on Google by using black hat tactics. However, sooner or later Google catches up and penalizes them. So be careful about copying them!
- elastic_church 10y ago
  But when you only need it for the next funding found, the means justify the ends Organic marketing means you have 10 million dollars from other people and 500 instagram followers and begging your own employees for likes. It means you waste $10,000 per day celebrating over a brief 200 person bump in your daily active users. It means one retweet has you saying "we're blowing up!"
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  The quality is low. It's spun text I assume by some interns or outsourced. They don't make any sense to people looking for info on the subject.
brianbreslin 10y ago
Can you report them to google?
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Theoretically yes: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en No idea if it has any impact.
  - koolba 10y ago
    I bet part of the black hat SEO toolkit involves a distributed reporting of your competitors as spam using this exact link.
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  Yes I can, but I'm not sure if it helps.
bflesch 10y ago
Good call to take it public, it's the only way to solve such an issue in time. Just wait until Matt Cutts or one of his team shows up here on HN to have a look at this problem.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  (Matt Cutts left Google eons ago; he formally resigned last December but had been on leave of absence long long long before that.)
  - bflesch 10y ago
    Based on the downvotes I received it seems that enough people still recognize him to get my point across.
    - willvarfar 10y ago
      I don't think you should be downvoted. Historically complaining on HN has been an excellent way to get the attention of people who care and can do something about things at these big faceless companies that skint on customer support. I for one remember when Matt or Android devs etc would wade in if one of the community got their point across on HN.
      - BorisMelnik 10y ago
        your right, and IIRC the "rap genius" fiasco that happened a few years back actually started on HN.
  - throwawayhv 10y ago
    Matt Cutts left Google eons ago Who is Matt Cutts' replacement? had been on leave of absence Why was he on a leave of absence?
- mgamache 10y ago
  Matt Cutts... Wow a blast from the past. Polarizing figure. Yes, he's gone along with any public explanation for SEO changes and guidance.
deleted 10y ago
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11Bravo 10y ago
Be happy to evaluate your site vs. the competitors and then give an opinion..
taveras 10y ago
If you feel it is web spam, I would report them to the search engines. For Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport And you can submit feedback to Bing on a search results page -- be detailed! It may not be fast, but it helps them.
- rcarrigan87 10y ago
  The problem with this is there is a whole industry around what is called 'negative SEO' which has basically defeated the purpose of these reporting tools. It goes like this. You want to hurt a competitor so you hire an SEO agency to do a bunch of black hat stuff to the competitor's site. Then you report the competitor's site to google in hopes that they penalize them. Now google is put in an awkward position where the site that looks guilty is actually innocent. For Google, the best place to focus is moving away from penalties for the most part and just trying to devalue spammy tactics. It'll never be perfect, but at least this way you avoid companies attacking each other.
  - ad-hominem 10y ago
    You can't simultaneously "devalue spammy tactics" and not be penalizing sites for spammy behavior.
  - throwmesomeseo 10y ago
    Do you know how they detect those? It looks that even pages with 100 links pointing to only one other site, with spammy domains and keyword stuffed texts still help with Google.
    - yohoho22 10y ago
      If the algorithms don't catch them, they'll eventually attract the attention of a human Google reviewer, at which point they'll be assessed a manual penalty that will show up in the Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en
  - 10y ago
lostboys67 10y ago
a DIY content farm is still against googles guidelines - and what exactly do you mean by bridge site? I suspect the OP is in a non English speaking country where anecdotally there is a lot more spammy crap going down.
- rcarrigan87 10y ago
  It's surprising how well spam tactics from a decade ago still work in US SERPs honestly.
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  More people probably use doorway site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page
catchsome 10y ago
I work in SEO and regularly see large, poor quality link networks benefit sites, despite all Google's efforts. Other people have already suggested reporting the sites, but in practice you will never be able to keep up with someone who is really putting effort into this tactic. It's best to avoid fighting this head on and stick to doing things properly - content, presentation and links. You may be under pressure now, but it's worth it in the long run. They will get their comeuppance. If you're lucky you might even get an cryptic answer from the source during one of the Google Webmasters Hangouts - https://plus.google.com/collection/8926cB https://plus.google.com/collection/8926cB (If you're interested I'm happy to have a five minute look in case I spot an opportunity you might have missed.)
sharkweek 10y ago
"Black hat" SEO will almost always work in the short term. I run a few sites and have seen competition pop up very fast, outrank me for a few months (one was even for almost a year), and then disappear completely. You then have a choice, ride these waves out, or play in the mud. At some point, Bad SEO will get caught and penalized/de-indexed, which for anyone that's not a household name, can entirely ruin your business if this is a main lead channel. I hate to sound generic but I think you just have to stay on your path, and bolster your own link profile with good links. This might be a good opportunity to hunt mid/longtail queries to boost traffic in less competitive SERPs. As a secondary, bigger picture thought, I think this is also an opportunity to hunt for more inbound channels. Relying too much on SEO is playing with fire.
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  Thanks for the encouragement, we probably ride it out. Our competitor goes to our customers and shows how he is 'better' on seo (it's relevant to our customers). We probably need to educate our customers more. Sadly the seo is very heated in that niche, so we went for long tail queries roughly 12 months ago. Yes we know, we would love to get of the seo addiction, but for us others channels are not working as good (we do newsletters, FB, Twitter, Google, print etc. also).
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  I think your advice to start building more inbound channels is definitely the right approach. I was chatting with a marketing exec in the real estate business and he said something I found chilling: "Google is transitioning to a pay for placement model." You can see this in things like: The move to 4 ads on top of SERPs - https://moz.com/blog/four-ads-on-top-the-wait-is-over https://moz.com/blog/four-ads-on-top-the-wait-is-over Making the Ad designation more subtle - http://blog.eyequant.com/blog/2014/03/20/why-the-new-google-search-ads-design-is-a-subtle-work-of-genius http://blog.eyequant.com/blog/2014/03/20/why-the-new-google-... Deep ad integration on mobile - http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/24/google-mobile-first http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/24/google-mobile-f...
- cardine 10y ago
  > You then have a choice, ride these waves out, or play in the mud. At some point, Bad SEO will get caught and penalized/de-indexed, which for anyone that's not a household name, can entirely ruin your business if this is a main lead channel. This is what makes competing against blackhat SEO so difficult. People who are doing blackhat SEO know this so they don't create huge amounts of links for a site that they want to stick around for a long time. They'll either rank a revolving door of sites that are easy to turn up, or they'll rank sites that feed to their main business (such as a "review" site). There is really no defending against this - right now Google can't algorithmically detect these links with any sort of speed or reliability and SEOers can create new sites faster than Google can accurately detect them.
benmorris 10y ago
If the bridge sites pass the test of being legitimately useful information rather than just spammy then I wouldn't consider what they are doing as black hat. This test is subjective or at the mercy of Google's current algorithm. If they are keyword stuffed junk then your SEO people are right penguin slammed keyword stuffing hard. I know because I was using these tactics back then. On the other hand a keyword specific micro site with useful information can rank and likely eventually pass on useful pagerank to the main site. The question I don't have the answer to is the period of time the site becomes beneficial. If you buy a new domain and setup a micro site I personally think it will take a year or more before the linked domain can benefit based on what I've seen. I base this on the fact when the micro site starts to rank itself and receives traffic. At that point I think it is safe to assume some rank is being passed onto the main site. So if I were in your shoes I'd analyze the age of the bridge/micro site, quality of content and the ranking for the targeted keywords for that domain to decide if your competition is benefitting from it.
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  We have analyzed those and sadly they are benefitting from them. The sites have no real content, users only click through (we did some user research).
  - benmorris 10y ago
    I've seen a lot of people come and go doing things like that. The vast majority may get a potentially large short term benefit but long term typically get penalized. Do report them as others have said if they are building junk sites.
deleted 10y ago
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programminggeek 10y ago
Pay for traffic and make it profitable. It's a more useful skill long term than playing the Google Black Box SEO Game.
- spullara 10y ago
  And this may explain why Google doesn't fix the problem. Not really in their best interest.
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  We're working on that, in a marketplace usually one side is easy making traffic profitable, the other is much harder (asymmetric).
throwmesomeseo 10y ago
Thanks for all the help!
austenallred 10y ago
This absolutely works but generally for a short time. How well probably depends on how good they are at it, and how often this will happen probably depends on how valuable the keywords you're going after are. I'm surprised no one has pointed this out; you can report them for paid/spam links in your Google Search Console. It doesn't solve the problem but it will speed it up, especially if it's a manual PBN (private blog network) and not 'web 2.0s' as they say in the SEO world (links from Wordpress, Blogspot, and other already-hosted varieties). Google is pretty good at finding how the PBN is tied together - usually by looking at the hosting, and it will kill their rankings for a long time. Also make sure to check your inbound links for negative SEO attacks. Since the most recent algorithm updates will penalize page by page for negative/spammy links it's possible that's happening to you as well. Google likes to pretend like that negative SEO doesn't exist, but it's probably the easiest way to climb to the top of rankings if the others are unaware of the intricacies of SEO. Search console is the only authoritative way to find those, but ahrefs will generally update faster and give you a head start. (I spend about 5 hours/week disavowing negative SEO links, and that's after I mostly-automated it). In the meantime, you might want to put a little more effort into getting links pointing to you, if for no other reason than to not leave yourself in such a precarious position. Feel free to email me and I'll look into it if you need more help. (I am over SEO at a YC startup trying to fix payday loans https://www.semrush.com/info/lendup.com+(by+organic) https://www.semrush.com/info/lendup.com+(by+organic), so as you can imagine we've seen it all... I hope).
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  Thanks!
- thomk 10y ago
  I have heard that disavowing is actually not a good practice because you can hurt your own ranking without much benefit (if there isn't a problem).
  - austenallred 10y ago
    True if there isn't a problem. But most sites nowadays have problems. The tricky part is links that look spammy to you can be viewed by Google as legitimate. So as a practice I only disavow the spammiest of spammy links.
Giorgi 10y ago
well, did not Google said "Content is King" guess not. AGAIN.
cookiecaper 10y ago
The niche that my startup operated in was eventually shut down, but we had a very similar situation. I emailed other sites and asked them to include a link (many replied back asking for compensation, which, according to Google policies, should've been nofollowed, i.e., made not to count for SEO), bought ads on private niche-specific sites/podcasts, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I also paid someone to write "high-quality content", which Google claims is the #1 way to rank, for months. In the big picture, these strategies are very expensive and not effective at all. We had about a one year head start and were the only place that provided the service we offered. Eventually, a (bad) competitor showed up. They engaged heavily in spammy SEO tactics and social media astroturfing and surpassed us within a couple of months, even though their product worked only 10-15% of the time. We refused to engage in those spammy tactics. Partially out of principle and partially out of just not having interest in that muck, as it's not remotely attractive to people who are used to being honest and doing meaningful non-spam work. But that decision absolutely did cost us. My advice is to think carefully about what may actually be over the line and what you've been socialized to believe is "uncool" or "distasteful". Then do those "uncool" things without making much noise about it (potentially even making some noise against it). Like everything else, there is the written rulebook and then there is the way things are actually done. Business is competitive and if you're not taking every advantage you can, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch. You have to be aggressive. That's hard to internalize (for me, it's taken multiple significant business failures), but it's crucially important to be successful. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. As for Google and SEO in general, every successful firm is at least "grey hat"; they're absolutely leveraging their portfolio as a "private blog network" (that is, a large, high-quality link ring) and otherwise regularly doing things that are borderline or off-book. If you grill them long enough, you can get close to having them admit this. Google has been totally and completely gamed for years. You have to know that going in. If you're dependent on SEO, you're going to have to play the SEO games with all of their uncomely accouterments, or your business will lose out to someone else. It's really that simple, and no one wants to admit it. All these people say these tactics only work for "a little while", but they're mostly wrong; unless you're being blatant, it seems to be quite easy to hide from Google's spam team. The real thing here is that Google is ripe for disruption. Virtually every query you input is going to be based on someone's application of SEO strategies meant to trick Google instead of based on the ultimate relevance/quality of the content.
20years 10y ago
They will eventually get caught and when they do, it will be very difficult for them to recover. If you are in this for the long haul, stay the clean route. I also highly suggest investing in other inbound traffic channels. Having all of your eggs in the Google basket is risky. You will sleep better at night knowing your customers are coming from multiple channels.
ryandrake 10y ago
Isn't it pretty risky to have a business rely so heavily on a 3rd party (Google) with whom you, presumably, do not have a business relationship? If your business is vulnerable to being hurt simply due to some other company "doing SEO", maybe consider trying to address that weakness directly rather than just riding it out or trying to SEO back at them. I don't think I'd have the guts to start a company that depended so heavily on the whims of Google's search algorithm.
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  If you're a marketplace it's mostly SEO (and branding). Yes it's risky to depend on Google.
  - dhimes 10y ago
    Per this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13914768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13914768 is it not possible to win at adwords in your area?
- sumedh 10y ago
  It is risky to depend on Google but what choice do you have when more than 90% of new visitors come to your site via google.
- gbelford 10y ago
  That's easy to say, hard to execute. Many businesses depend very heavily on SEO as a means of acquisition.
JVerstry 10y ago
Don't engage in such tactics, because once Google hits, it hits hard... Report this black hat SEO and be patient. Keep doing the right thing. SEO is a marathon. But most important, make sure you meet your visitors' intent over and over, again and again. Google focuses on customer satisfaction, not on promotion of good SEO.
otto_ortega 10y ago
A better question would be: Can anybody recommend an up-today resource for PROVED SEO techniques (white, grey or black hat), like a book, vlog, or similar? There is a ton of information about SEO out there but it is quite difficult to filter the garbage from what it actually works.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Write good content.
  - dhimes 10y ago
    That actually isn't great.
- mindingdata 10y ago
  The issue with this is that there are so many "grey" areas for different people. Google themselves don't really want you building links manually, they think that if you have good content, you will get links naturally and all will be right in the world. At one point years ago I got half way through finishing an eBook/info product that was an SEO checklist. But half way through I felt that some people would find link building "spammy" no matter what. At that time, I was manually building large Web 2.0 networks with good quality content, and having it all funnel up to my main site. Even this can be seen as "grey hat" at the very least to some.
benologist 10y ago
I think the main issue is you need more ways to get customers, cause in SEO almost everything everyone else does - including Google - can derail all of your effort.
deleted 10y ago
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bhartzer 10y ago
I hate to say it, but if you're looking at Semrush or ahrefs for link data, those aren't going to be the best sources. Try Majestic or Link Research Tools. In regards to "keyword heavy domains and keyword heavy content with all links pointing to their site", the search engines tend to favor on-topic content links, especially if those domains have trust and authority. I wouldn't necessarily call that a "black hat" strategy.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
If you think they're being shady and you aren't afraid to walk in the grey/black hat arena, one thing you can do is negative SEO. -- Buy up some link blasts to the shittiest sites imaginably, or use a tool to do it manually. 20,000 new links in a month from porn/warez/etc sites to your competitor ought to take them out completely. The benefit here is there's really no way to trace it back to your site, and penalize your rankings because of this behavior. Edit: I'm not in SEO anymore, and I can say this is highly unethical, been about 5 years and I only did whitehat. I'm a developer now, and I don't condone or think negative SEO is proper, but it's done everyday, and I'm just laying it out as an option the op has.
- mgamache 10y ago
  I don't think negative SEO works anymore. Google devalues the inbound links, but doesn't penalize the target site. In the case of Rap Genius I think they made a change specifically for them that punished their bad behavior. I stepped out of an SEO project about 18 months ago so my info is probably dated. Google makes several updates a year.
  - gremlinsinc 10y ago
    yeah I stepped out in 2012'ish, so don't have much clue anymore what's 'hot' in SEO tech circles.
theartfuldodger 10y ago
I've made my living in SEO for nearly a decade now, I'm not in a position to risk any brand I represent with possible penalties, (but that is incredibly uncommon,) or in spending time and budget on increases generated through unreliable means that may disappear one day. But that's all that stops me. It's just safer to build slow and natural. Even when these grey networks go down, that often just means those links no longer provide value rather than an actual penalty.That is an important distinction. Since that site enjoyed higher visibility if there was any value to the site while it was in that improved position it likely secures more references,links,sales, income to support more legitimate content creation and traditional marketing. If it was my personal business or side project and I was losing in the rather unreliable and unfair game that is the Google dance because the competitor was "cheating" I would absolutely return that tactic against them. It is surprising that still seems to work but playing fair won't help you catch up unless they are so blatant that they get a manual penalty. But, if you came to me as consultant I couldn't suggest that because it's unreliable, unethical and dirty. I would admit that it still works though. Is there any reason you can't win via "ethical" tactics, are you truly creating content and resources that people might naturally link to and promote? One of the sad oft-repeated stories is that if you create great content and resources ..the links will come ... but that leaves something very important out, only us webmasters,seo's,bloggers can generate links so unless your content appeals to that audience in addition to your consumers.. how are you going to get natural links and what is the carrot to the piblisher audience to do that for you? If you can answer that and do influencer targeting / "blogger outreach" then you can play fair. How many people have seen great backlink generation from getting their article or business here on HN? Can you get on here naturally? Then maybe you have the type of site,business,content to survive in natural SEO, otherwise maybe that shouldn't be your primary channel. I certainly prefer PPC for "boring" topics, as you can eventually learn your all your costs, work off real conversion data and scale and test off of a relative constant.
- theartfuldodger 10y ago
  quick addition: I'm generally calloused to believing the first theory about why your website performs below a competitor is the correct one. Have you made sure your site loads faster, do you know how engaged your users are and what have you done to increase that engagement.Is your mobile experience better than average, do your meta titles encourage people to click or has your seo battle descended into keyword stuffed titles? Is your on page stronger than them? Who says so? Have you audited your own content and architecture inside and out to make sure that rather than they have a leg up, you actually just have some deficit. Did both your sites start at the same time, have you been preserving your architecture as you rebuilt the site, do you check server logs for malformed Url requests, 404'so? Might want to be sure some of these relatively easy comparisons and factors are in your favor before deciding that the link network you judge as valueless are providing that value that beats you. My apologies if you have truly exhausted all those concerns, but I so rarely see that to be true.
zer00eyz 10y ago
Some honest advice: For lots of companies and businesses SEO at the level your talking about just isn't worth it. There are simply more effective ways to spend the capital and get the results you want. Organic is great but it isn't the only game in town. What does your company do (the vaguest of terms will do... Sells clothing, software as a service) What does the rest of your marketing look like? Ad buys, email, product distribution for review or placement, and PR...
travisty 10y ago
Blackhat SEO doesn't work unless the company is producing positive results with customers. You can use all the shady SEO work out there, but if viewers and customers aren't using the site then blackhat can't save it. So it really comes down to the fact that your competitor is doing something better than you outside SEO. Better product, service, prices, customer service? Whatever it is, they are doing it. So rather than cry about it to HackerNews, you should probably spend the time and effort working on your own business and stop worrying about your competitors. You see this all the time with companies who spend 100% more time on their competitors than they do their own business. Then they whine about not being number one. It's really pathetic and this post is no different.
fulldecent 10y ago
My company is Pacific Medical Training and we do CPR training. This is an extremely competitive space with many losers. I saw one competitor at a conference and quickly figured out that the people at the booth did NOT work for the company and basically knew nothing (and they had vista print business cards). Their SEO strategy included buying the Drupal plugin that adds Facebook/Twitter links to your page. Then they pushed an update that includes invisible text "BUY YOUR ACLS WITH US" and a link to their homepage. Google immediately ranked them first and they stayed for 3 weeks. Then they got blacklisted. I purchased email-outreach linkbuilding from a company whose name rhymes with Winter-mitt harkening binges. Complete scam, and they sold us links and then sold the same links to our competitor. I actually have their client list and know that they are doing this to other companies. END RESULT. Internet marketing is very important to our company so I decided to bring this function in-house. Last year we created 500+ high-quality inbound links. So hang in there kid, keep doing it the right way and things will work out.
mgamache 10y ago
The basic problem is Google has no idea what good content is. It relies on external 'signals' to determine what to rank. Those signals will be manipulated by people. Once a manipulation strategy becomes widespread enough to impact search quality Google will adjust to compensate. This game has been going on for many years. It's cat and mouse between SEO black hats and Google engineers. I have looked into black hat SEO (a few years ago). Two words of caution: 1) Setting up black hat (or grey hat) can be costly and time consuming. 2) You are assuming the competitor's rank is going up due to black hat SEO. That may not be the case. A few backlinks from top sites can leave you in the dust.
itsjamesfoster 10y ago
short term results.
asgharali7072 10y ago
I created this website for seo tutorial in urdu and hind language http://apnapedia.com http://apnapedia.com

255 points by throwmesomeseo 10y ago

marcjohnson1985 10y ago

I'd first check if those "bridge sites" are really black hat or simply a very labour-intensive and effective way for them to increase their SEO efforts. What's the quality of those sites like? Also, sometimes sites have a short-lived improvement on Google by using black hat tactics. However, sooner or later Google catches up and penalizes them. So be careful about copying them!

elastic_church 10y ago
But when you only need it for the next funding found, the means justify the ends Organic marketing means you have 10 million dollars from other people and 500 instagram followers and begging your own employees for likes. It means you waste $10,000 per day celebrating over a brief 200 person bump in your daily active users. It means one retweet has you saying "we're blowing up!"
throwmesomeseo 10y ago
The quality is low. It's spun text I assume by some interns or outsourced. They don't make any sense to people looking for info on the subject.

brianbreslin 10y ago

Can you report them to google?

angry-hacker 10y ago
Theoretically yes: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en No idea if it has any impact.
- koolba 10y ago
  I bet part of the black hat SEO toolkit involves a distributed reporting of your competitors as spam using this exact link.
throwmesomeseo 10y ago
Yes I can, but I'm not sure if it helps.

bflesch 10y ago

Good call to take it public, it's the only way to solve such an issue in time. Just wait until Matt Cutts or one of his team shows up here on HN to have a look at this problem.

willvarfar 10y ago
(Matt Cutts left Google eons ago; he formally resigned last December but had been on leave of absence long long long before that.)
- bflesch 10y ago
  Based on the downvotes I received it seems that enough people still recognize him to get my point across.
  - willvarfar 10y ago
    I don't think you should be downvoted. Historically complaining on HN has been an excellent way to get the attention of people who care and can do something about things at these big faceless companies that skint on customer support. I for one remember when Matt or Android devs etc would wade in if one of the community got their point across on HN.
    - BorisMelnik 10y ago
      your right, and IIRC the "rap genius" fiasco that happened a few years back actually started on HN.
- throwawayhv 10y ago
  Matt Cutts left Google eons ago Who is Matt Cutts' replacement? had been on leave of absence Why was he on a leave of absence?
mgamache 10y ago
Matt Cutts... Wow a blast from the past. Polarizing figure. Yes, he's gone along with any public explanation for SEO changes and guidance.

deleted 10y ago

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11Bravo 10y ago

Be happy to evaluate your site vs. the competitors and then give an opinion..

taveras 10y ago

If you feel it is web spam, I would report them to the search engines. For Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport And you can submit feedback to Bing on a search results page -- be detailed! It may not be fast, but it helps them.

rcarrigan87 10y ago
The problem with this is there is a whole industry around what is called 'negative SEO' which has basically defeated the purpose of these reporting tools. It goes like this. You want to hurt a competitor so you hire an SEO agency to do a bunch of black hat stuff to the competitor's site. Then you report the competitor's site to google in hopes that they penalize them. Now google is put in an awkward position where the site that looks guilty is actually innocent. For Google, the best place to focus is moving away from penalties for the most part and just trying to devalue spammy tactics. It'll never be perfect, but at least this way you avoid companies attacking each other.
- ad-hominem 10y ago
  You can't simultaneously "devalue spammy tactics" and not be penalizing sites for spammy behavior.
- throwmesomeseo 10y ago
  Do you know how they detect those? It looks that even pages with 100 links pointing to only one other site, with spammy domains and keyword stuffed texts still help with Google.
  - yohoho22 10y ago
    If the algorithms don't catch them, they'll eventually attract the attention of a human Google reviewer, at which point they'll be assessed a manual penalty that will show up in the Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en
- 10y ago

lostboys67 10y ago

a DIY content farm is still against googles guidelines - and what exactly do you mean by bridge site? I suspect the OP is in a non English speaking country where anecdotally there is a lot more spammy crap going down.

rcarrigan87 10y ago
It's surprising how well spam tactics from a decade ago still work in US SERPs honestly.
throwmesomeseo 10y ago
More people probably use doorway site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page

catchsome 10y ago

I work in SEO and regularly see large, poor quality link networks benefit sites, despite all Google's efforts. Other people have already suggested reporting the sites, but in practice you will never be able to keep up with someone who is really putting effort into this tactic. It's best to avoid fighting this head on and stick to doing things properly - content, presentation and links. You may be under pressure now, but it's worth it in the long run. They will get their comeuppance. If you're lucky you might even get an cryptic answer from the source during one of the Google Webmasters Hangouts - https://plus.google.com/collection/8926cB https://plus.google.com/collection/8926cB (If you're interested I'm happy to have a five minute look in case I spot an opportunity you might have missed.)

sharkweek 10y ago

"Black hat" SEO will almost always work in the short term. I run a few sites and have seen competition pop up very fast, outrank me for a few months (one was even for almost a year), and then disappear completely. You then have a choice, ride these waves out, or play in the mud. At some point, Bad SEO will get caught and penalized/de-indexed, which for anyone that's not a household name, can entirely ruin your business if this is a main lead channel. I hate to sound generic but I think you just have to stay on your path, and bolster your own link profile with good links. This might be a good opportunity to hunt mid/longtail queries to boost traffic in less competitive SERPs. As a secondary, bigger picture thought, I think this is also an opportunity to hunt for more inbound channels. Relying too much on SEO is playing with fire.

throwmesomeseo 10y ago
Thanks for the encouragement, we probably ride it out. Our competitor goes to our customers and shows how he is 'better' on seo (it's relevant to our customers). We probably need to educate our customers more. Sadly the seo is very heated in that niche, so we went for long tail queries roughly 12 months ago. Yes we know, we would love to get of the seo addiction, but for us others channels are not working as good (we do newsletters, FB, Twitter, Google, print etc. also).
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
I think your advice to start building more inbound channels is definitely the right approach. I was chatting with a marketing exec in the real estate business and he said something I found chilling: "Google is transitioning to a pay for placement model." You can see this in things like: The move to 4 ads on top of SERPs - https://moz.com/blog/four-ads-on-top-the-wait-is-over https://moz.com/blog/four-ads-on-top-the-wait-is-over Making the Ad designation more subtle - http://blog.eyequant.com/blog/2014/03/20/why-the-new-google-search-ads-design-is-a-subtle-work-of-genius http://blog.eyequant.com/blog/2014/03/20/why-the-new-google-... Deep ad integration on mobile - http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/24/google-mobile-first http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/24/google-mobile-f...
cardine 10y ago
> You then have a choice, ride these waves out, or play in the mud. At some point, Bad SEO will get caught and penalized/de-indexed, which for anyone that's not a household name, can entirely ruin your business if this is a main lead channel. This is what makes competing against blackhat SEO so difficult. People who are doing blackhat SEO know this so they don't create huge amounts of links for a site that they want to stick around for a long time. They'll either rank a revolving door of sites that are easy to turn up, or they'll rank sites that feed to their main business (such as a "review" site). There is really no defending against this - right now Google can't algorithmically detect these links with any sort of speed or reliability and SEOers can create new sites faster than Google can accurately detect them.

benmorris 10y ago

If the bridge sites pass the test of being legitimately useful information rather than just spammy then I wouldn't consider what they are doing as black hat. This test is subjective or at the mercy of Google's current algorithm. If they are keyword stuffed junk then your SEO people are right penguin slammed keyword stuffing hard. I know because I was using these tactics back then. On the other hand a keyword specific micro site with useful information can rank and likely eventually pass on useful pagerank to the main site. The question I don't have the answer to is the period of time the site becomes beneficial. If you buy a new domain and setup a micro site I personally think it will take a year or more before the linked domain can benefit based on what I've seen. I base this on the fact when the micro site starts to rank itself and receives traffic. At that point I think it is safe to assume some rank is being passed onto the main site. So if I were in your shoes I'd analyze the age of the bridge/micro site, quality of content and the ranking for the targeted keywords for that domain to decide if your competition is benefitting from it.

throwmesomeseo 10y ago
We have analyzed those and sadly they are benefitting from them. The sites have no real content, users only click through (we did some user research).
- benmorris 10y ago
  I've seen a lot of people come and go doing things like that. The vast majority may get a potentially large short term benefit but long term typically get penalized. Do report them as others have said if they are building junk sites.

deleted 10y ago

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programminggeek 10y ago

Pay for traffic and make it profitable. It's a more useful skill long term than playing the Google Black Box SEO Game.

spullara 10y ago
And this may explain why Google doesn't fix the problem. Not really in their best interest.
throwmesomeseo 10y ago
We're working on that, in a marketplace usually one side is easy making traffic profitable, the other is much harder (asymmetric).

throwmesomeseo 10y ago

Thanks for all the help!

austenallred 10y ago

This absolutely works but generally for a short time. How well probably depends on how good they are at it, and how often this will happen probably depends on how valuable the keywords you're going after are. I'm surprised no one has pointed this out; you can report them for paid/spam links in your Google Search Console. It doesn't solve the problem but it will speed it up, especially if it's a manual PBN (private blog network) and not 'web 2.0s' as they say in the SEO world (links from Wordpress, Blogspot, and other already-hosted varieties). Google is pretty good at finding how the PBN is tied together - usually by looking at the hosting, and it will kill their rankings for a long time. Also make sure to check your inbound links for negative SEO attacks. Since the most recent algorithm updates will penalize page by page for negative/spammy links it's possible that's happening to you as well. Google likes to pretend like that negative SEO doesn't exist, but it's probably the easiest way to climb to the top of rankings if the others are unaware of the intricacies of SEO. Search console is the only authoritative way to find those, but ahrefs will generally update faster and give you a head start. (I spend about 5 hours/week disavowing negative SEO links, and that's after I mostly-automated it). In the meantime, you might want to put a little more effort into getting links pointing to you, if for no other reason than to not leave yourself in such a precarious position. Feel free to email me and I'll look into it if you need more help. (I am over SEO at a YC startup trying to fix payday loans https://www.semrush.com/info/lendup.com+(by+organic) https://www.semrush.com/info/lendup.com+(by+organic), so as you can imagine we've seen it all... I hope).

throwmesomeseo 10y ago
Thanks!
thomk 10y ago
I have heard that disavowing is actually not a good practice because you can hurt your own ranking without much benefit (if there isn't a problem).
- austenallred 10y ago
  True if there isn't a problem. But most sites nowadays have problems. The tricky part is links that look spammy to you can be viewed by Google as legitimate. So as a practice I only disavow the spammiest of spammy links.

Giorgi 10y ago

well, did not Google said "Content is King" guess not. AGAIN.

cookiecaper 10y ago

The niche that my startup operated in was eventually shut down, but we had a very similar situation. I emailed other sites and asked them to include a link (many replied back asking for compensation, which, according to Google policies, should've been nofollowed, i.e., made not to count for SEO), bought ads on private niche-specific sites/podcasts, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I also paid someone to write "high-quality content", which Google claims is the #1 way to rank, for months. In the big picture, these strategies are very expensive and not effective at all. We had about a one year head start and were the only place that provided the service we offered. Eventually, a (bad) competitor showed up. They engaged heavily in spammy SEO tactics and social media astroturfing and surpassed us within a couple of months, even though their product worked only 10-15% of the time. We refused to engage in those spammy tactics. Partially out of principle and partially out of just not having interest in that muck, as it's not remotely attractive to people who are used to being honest and doing meaningful non-spam work. But that decision absolutely did cost us. My advice is to think carefully about what may actually be over the line and what you've been socialized to believe is "uncool" or "distasteful". Then do those "uncool" things without making much noise about it (potentially even making some noise against it). Like everything else, there is the written rulebook and then there is the way things are actually done. Business is competitive and if you're not taking every advantage you can, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch. You have to be aggressive. That's hard to internalize (for me, it's taken multiple significant business failures), but it's crucially important to be successful. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. As for Google and SEO in general, every successful firm is at least "grey hat"; they're absolutely leveraging their portfolio as a "private blog network" (that is, a large, high-quality link ring) and otherwise regularly doing things that are borderline or off-book. If you grill them long enough, you can get close to having them admit this. Google has been totally and completely gamed for years. You have to know that going in. If you're dependent on SEO, you're going to have to play the SEO games with all of their uncomely accouterments, or your business will lose out to someone else. It's really that simple, and no one wants to admit it. All these people say these tactics only work for "a little while", but they're mostly wrong; unless you're being blatant, it seems to be quite easy to hide from Google's spam team. The real thing here is that Google is ripe for disruption. Virtually every query you input is going to be based on someone's application of SEO strategies meant to trick Google instead of based on the ultimate relevance/quality of the content.

20years 10y ago

They will eventually get caught and when they do, it will be very difficult for them to recover. If you are in this for the long haul, stay the clean route. I also highly suggest investing in other inbound traffic channels. Having all of your eggs in the Google basket is risky. You will sleep better at night knowing your customers are coming from multiple channels.

ryandrake 10y ago

Isn't it pretty risky to have a business rely so heavily on a 3rd party (Google) with whom you, presumably, do not have a business relationship? If your business is vulnerable to being hurt simply due to some other company "doing SEO", maybe consider trying to address that weakness directly rather than just riding it out or trying to SEO back at them. I don't think I'd have the guts to start a company that depended so heavily on the whims of Google's search algorithm.

throwmesomeseo 10y ago
If you're a marketplace it's mostly SEO (and branding). Yes it's risky to depend on Google.
- dhimes 10y ago
  Per this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13914768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13914768 is it not possible to win at adwords in your area?
sumedh 10y ago
It is risky to depend on Google but what choice do you have when more than 90% of new visitors come to your site via google.
gbelford 10y ago
That's easy to say, hard to execute. Many businesses depend very heavily on SEO as a means of acquisition.

JVerstry 10y ago

Don't engage in such tactics, because once Google hits, it hits hard... Report this black hat SEO and be patient. Keep doing the right thing. SEO is a marathon. But most important, make sure you meet your visitors' intent over and over, again and again. Google focuses on customer satisfaction, not on promotion of good SEO.

otto_ortega 10y ago

A better question would be: Can anybody recommend an up-today resource for PROVED SEO techniques (white, grey or black hat), like a book, vlog, or similar? There is a ton of information about SEO out there but it is quite difficult to filter the garbage from what it actually works.

user5994461 10y ago
Write good content.
- dhimes 10y ago
  That actually isn't great.
mindingdata 10y ago
The issue with this is that there are so many "grey" areas for different people. Google themselves don't really want you building links manually, they think that if you have good content, you will get links naturally and all will be right in the world. At one point years ago I got half way through finishing an eBook/info product that was an SEO checklist. But half way through I felt that some people would find link building "spammy" no matter what. At that time, I was manually building large Web 2.0 networks with good quality content, and having it all funnel up to my main site. Even this can be seen as "grey hat" at the very least to some.

benologist 10y ago

I think the main issue is you need more ways to get customers, cause in SEO almost everything everyone else does - including Google - can derail all of your effort.

deleted 10y ago

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bhartzer 10y ago

I hate to say it, but if you're looking at Semrush or ahrefs for link data, those aren't going to be the best sources. Try Majestic or Link Research Tools. In regards to "keyword heavy domains and keyword heavy content with all links pointing to their site", the search engines tend to favor on-topic content links, especially if those domains have trust and authority. I wouldn't necessarily call that a "black hat" strategy.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

If you think they're being shady and you aren't afraid to walk in the grey/black hat arena, one thing you can do is negative SEO. -- Buy up some link blasts to the shittiest sites imaginably, or use a tool to do it manually. 20,000 new links in a month from porn/warez/etc sites to your competitor ought to take them out completely. The benefit here is there's really no way to trace it back to your site, and penalize your rankings because of this behavior. Edit: I'm not in SEO anymore, and I can say this is highly unethical, been about 5 years and I only did whitehat. I'm a developer now, and I don't condone or think negative SEO is proper, but it's done everyday, and I'm just laying it out as an option the op has.

mgamache 10y ago
I don't think negative SEO works anymore. Google devalues the inbound links, but doesn't penalize the target site. In the case of Rap Genius I think they made a change specifically for them that punished their bad behavior. I stepped out of an SEO project about 18 months ago so my info is probably dated. Google makes several updates a year.
- gremlinsinc 10y ago
  yeah I stepped out in 2012'ish, so don't have much clue anymore what's 'hot' in SEO tech circles.

theartfuldodger 10y ago

I've made my living in SEO for nearly a decade now, I'm not in a position to risk any brand I represent with possible penalties, (but that is incredibly uncommon,) or in spending time and budget on increases generated through unreliable means that may disappear one day. But that's all that stops me. It's just safer to build slow and natural. Even when these grey networks go down, that often just means those links no longer provide value rather than an actual penalty.That is an important distinction. Since that site enjoyed higher visibility if there was any value to the site while it was in that improved position it likely secures more references,links,sales, income to support more legitimate content creation and traditional marketing. If it was my personal business or side project and I was losing in the rather unreliable and unfair game that is the Google dance because the competitor was "cheating" I would absolutely return that tactic against them. It is surprising that still seems to work but playing fair won't help you catch up unless they are so blatant that they get a manual penalty. But, if you came to me as consultant I couldn't suggest that because it's unreliable, unethical and dirty. I would admit that it still works though. Is there any reason you can't win via "ethical" tactics, are you truly creating content and resources that people might naturally link to and promote? One of the sad oft-repeated stories is that if you create great content and resources ..the links will come ... but that leaves something very important out, only us webmasters,seo's,bloggers can generate links so unless your content appeals to that audience in addition to your consumers.. how are you going to get natural links and what is the carrot to the piblisher audience to do that for you? If you can answer that and do influencer targeting / "blogger outreach" then you can play fair. How many people have seen great backlink generation from getting their article or business here on HN? Can you get on here naturally? Then maybe you have the type of site,business,content to survive in natural SEO, otherwise maybe that shouldn't be your primary channel. I certainly prefer PPC for "boring" topics, as you can eventually learn your all your costs, work off real conversion data and scale and test off of a relative constant.

theartfuldodger 10y ago
quick addition: I'm generally calloused to believing the first theory about why your website performs below a competitor is the correct one. Have you made sure your site loads faster, do you know how engaged your users are and what have you done to increase that engagement.Is your mobile experience better than average, do your meta titles encourage people to click or has your seo battle descended into keyword stuffed titles? Is your on page stronger than them? Who says so? Have you audited your own content and architecture inside and out to make sure that rather than they have a leg up, you actually just have some deficit. Did both your sites start at the same time, have you been preserving your architecture as you rebuilt the site, do you check server logs for malformed Url requests, 404'so? Might want to be sure some of these relatively easy comparisons and factors are in your favor before deciding that the link network you judge as valueless are providing that value that beats you. My apologies if you have truly exhausted all those concerns, but I so rarely see that to be true.

zer00eyz 10y ago

Some honest advice: For lots of companies and businesses SEO at the level your talking about just isn't worth it. There are simply more effective ways to spend the capital and get the results you want. Organic is great but it isn't the only game in town. What does your company do (the vaguest of terms will do... Sells clothing, software as a service) What does the rest of your marketing look like? Ad buys, email, product distribution for review or placement, and PR...

travisty 10y ago

Blackhat SEO doesn't work unless the company is producing positive results with customers. You can use all the shady SEO work out there, but if viewers and customers aren't using the site then blackhat can't save it. So it really comes down to the fact that your competitor is doing something better than you outside SEO. Better product, service, prices, customer service? Whatever it is, they are doing it. So rather than cry about it to HackerNews, you should probably spend the time and effort working on your own business and stop worrying about your competitors. You see this all the time with companies who spend 100% more time on their competitors than they do their own business. Then they whine about not being number one. It's really pathetic and this post is no different.

fulldecent 10y ago

My company is Pacific Medical Training and we do CPR training. This is an extremely competitive space with many losers. I saw one competitor at a conference and quickly figured out that the people at the booth did NOT work for the company and basically knew nothing (and they had vista print business cards). Their SEO strategy included buying the Drupal plugin that adds Facebook/Twitter links to your page. Then they pushed an update that includes invisible text "BUY YOUR ACLS WITH US" and a link to their homepage. Google immediately ranked them first and they stayed for 3 weeks. Then they got blacklisted. I purchased email-outreach linkbuilding from a company whose name rhymes with Winter-mitt harkening binges. Complete scam, and they sold us links and then sold the same links to our competitor. I actually have their client list and know that they are doing this to other companies. END RESULT. Internet marketing is very important to our company so I decided to bring this function in-house. Last year we created 500+ high-quality inbound links. So hang in there kid, keep doing it the right way and things will work out.

mgamache 10y ago

The basic problem is Google has no idea what good content is. It relies on external 'signals' to determine what to rank. Those signals will be manipulated by people. Once a manipulation strategy becomes widespread enough to impact search quality Google will adjust to compensate. This game has been going on for many years. It's cat and mouse between SEO black hats and Google engineers. I have looked into black hat SEO (a few years ago). Two words of caution: 1) Setting up black hat (or grey hat) can be costly and time consuming. 2) You are assuming the competitor's rank is going up due to black hat SEO. That may not be the case. A few backlinks from top sites can leave you in the dust.

itsjamesfoster 10y ago

short term results.

asgharali7072 10y ago

I created this website for seo tutorial in urdu and hind language http://apnapedia.com http://apnapedia.com