You've built a fantastic site full of excellent, link-worthy content. You're actively building relationships in the social space that send quality traffic to your site and establish your authority within your industry. You've focused on creating a great user experience and deliver value to your site's visitors... and yet you're still getting outranked by garbage websites that objectively don't deserve to show up ahead of you.
In short, you're following the advice that all the top SEO experts are giving out, but you simply can't pull the same quantity of links that some of your less ethical competition is nabbing. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from that trash that's pushing you down in the SERPs and start copying their links.
A Prime Example of Garbage in the SERPs
To determine how low value sites are able to rank for competitive terms, we're going to dissect one of the most astonishing achievements in SERP manipulation I've seen in a long time -- a situation where several billion dollar brands got stomped by a low quality site for some of the most competitive (and valuable) terms online. "Car Insurance" and "auto insurance" (and a host of related terms).
Take a look at these search results and I'm sure you can spot the outlier (hint... I put a box around it, wrote something next to it, and drew a big red arrow pointing to it):
You found it? Awesomesauce! There, sitting pretty at #2 for one of the Holy Grail search terms, right in between Progressive and Geico was... AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com? Not the most trustworthy looking domain name but to rank second for car insurance (and fourth for "auto insurance") it must be an impressive site, right?
Surely it's going to be stuffed with linkbait content like lists of the least and most expensive cars to insure, lists of the most expensive cities and states to insure a vehicle, calculators for determining the right amount of insurance to get, tips for lowering your insurance rate, and lists of the most frequently stolen or vandalized cars. It'll be very attractive and super user friendly. Has to be, doesn't it?
A Look at the Site
Far from it -- it's a large lead capture form at the top of the page (powered by Sure Hits), some low quality text content below it, and a single navigation item (leading to the site's blog). Nothing else.
The site's blog doesn't prove to be a whole lot better, as it's jam packed with poorly written content, most of which exists only to create a reasonable amount of space in between repetitions of keyword phrases.
When I find a site like this ranking in a competitive niche, my first thought is always that the search result I'm seeing might be an anomaly. I double-checked with my buddy Ian Howells (@ianhowells - smart dude) and he was seeing the same thing. Then I looked it up at SEMrush.com, where I saw this:
Looks Like Google Forgot to Take Out the Trash
This was no fluke. In under a year this site had gone from a newly registered domain (December 2010 registration date) to the top of the mountain of search, ranking for some of the most competitive terms online. SEM Rush estimated the paid search equivalent value of the traffic received by this domain to be over $4 million... per month!
That's a lot of scratch generated by a site that's not employing a single one of the methods most leading SEO experts currently preach... so what gives?
Well, to find out, let's head on over to Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO to take a closer look at how a simple lead capture site was able to build up enough authority to outrank the world's most famous insurance-touting lizard... and what we can learn from it to help our sites climb the search rankings.
From Majestic SEO, I was able to pull a backlinks discovery chart that shows approximate numbers for the amount of new links added per month. It's pretty clear that these guys weren't messing around with a conservative link velocity. They really got after it, adding a considerable amount of new links early in the site's life cycle and became even more aggressive starting in October. This second push correlates pretty nicely with the spike in organic search traffic shown above from SEMrush.
So we know that this site grabbed top rankings for some super competitive keywords and held the position for several months. We also know it employed an aggressive link building campaign. It's time to dive deeper into what these links looked like and where they were placed to see if we can replicate them.
After running an export of AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com's link profile from OSE, I started to analyze their link profile, focusing initially on anchor text distribution. Looking at the chart below, you'll notice that the site is very heavily weighted towards targeted anchor text. Their top 10 most frequently occurring anchor texts made up nearly 80% of all links.
Within the subset of links that contain targeted anchor text, there's a fair amount of variety, though the vast majority of the links contain some modified form of "auto insurance" and "car insurance." All interesting information, but before looking at this chart, we all probably knew that the site was going to be ranking based on heavy usage of anchor text. That isn't super actionable data -- if we were looking to compete in this space, we'd already plan on trying to get lots of exact and partial match links.
But what if there was an easy way to burn through this list of links and spot the ones that would be super easy to copy? What if, without having to manually load a single page, we could identify all of the blog comments, blogroll links, author bios, footer links, resource boxes, link lists, and private blog network posts? Wouldn't that be helpful? Even for the ultra-white hats, using this approach could eliminate these cheap links and make it more efficient to identify legitimate editorial links that you might try to match.
Taking Link Analysis a Step Further -- Using Semantic Markup to Identify Link Types
The good news is that we can quickly sift through a mountain of backlinks and reliably segment them into groups. Thanks to the adoption of semantic markup over the past few years, most websites happily give this information away.
"What's semantic markup?" some of you ask. It's code that inherently has meaning. Code that describes its own purpose to the browser (or crawler). In a perfect world, that means elements like <header>, <article>, and <footer>. Those are all available in HTML 5. But since the advent of id and class names in markup, developers have been trying to add meaning to what would otherwise be ambiguous code. Most of the web is now built to look like this:
<div class="comment">My comment goes here</div>
or this:
<div id="footer">Copyright info, etc.</div>
Sadly, it doesn't quite look like this:
<a href="my-spammy-website" class="spam-links">My spammy anchor text</a>
But there's enough meaning built in to most id and class names that we can start to discern quite quickly what most elements mean. Knowing that this is a pretty standard convention, it's not too hard to build a crawler that will analyze this data for us, looping through each line of our OSE export. For each entry it will (this is going to get a little nerdy, so bear with me):
- Fetch the url of the page that contains the link to the target site
- Convert that info into a Document Object Model (DOM) object
- Run an xPath query to find the link on the page with a matching href value
- Reverse traverse the DOM, looking for containing elements that contain a class or id value that matches a link-type pattern
In non-geek speak, that means that we check to see if our link sits inside of a container that has a recognizable id or class name.
Classifying the Links
If, during that reverse traversal, it finds a match, we can effectively label that link. So if our link appears inside a div with the id of "footer" we can label that as a footer link. If it's in a div or paragraph (or any other element) with the class of "comment-37268," we can still call it a match and note that it's a comment link.
We can add a second level of information on comment links by searching the DOM for all external links on the page and counting the total. The higher the number, the greater the likelihood that the site is auto-approving comments.
If we fail to retrieve the page or we get the page but the link is no longer present, we can label the link as dead.
We can also do some simple domain matching on known article directories, web directories, and web 2.0 properties, though for this example I only used a few domains for each of these groupings. With larger lists, the "unknown" link types would likely shrink.
With the crawler built and running, I was able to pull the following data for this site (dead links removed):
The chart above starts to paint a much clearer picture of how these rankings were built -- blog commenting, article marketing, and sidebar links played a big role in boosting this site's link profile.
What do those links have in common? They are very unlikely to be legitimate editorial links. Instead, it looks like the rankings for this site were built on "link dropping," the process of leveraging control of an independent site to leave your own link without oversight or review.
Since we've been able to automatically identify roughly 65% of the live links to the site, we've got a smaller unknown group to work with now. as a result, we can pull some of those remaining unidentified links for manual review. And that's where we see gems like this:
Sifting through a sampling of these unclassified links, we see a bunch of web sites like this, which to a machine look like contextual links in the main content area. Obviously, this doesn't stand up to human review and is a completely indefensible link building strategy.
We also spot a bunch of links on sites with posts covering a wide range of topics. They're publishing new content pretty frequently and every post has links in it with targeted anchor text (to highly profitable niches).
These types of posts come from one of the most effective link dropping strategies working today -- the use of private blog networks. So let's start to look into how we can more accurately classify these links by network so we can start posting to them as well.
The Next Step: Domain Matching to Identify Private Blog Networks
Effective private blog networks are built to have no footprint. They look like completely independent sites, don't interlink, and have no shared code. When done correctly, they won't share an IP address, Google AdSense publisher ID, or Google Analytics account. In short, they can't be spotted by analyzing the on-page content.
A truly private blog network (one owned entirely by a company that uses it to get their own rankings), is almost impossible to identify. Blog networks that are open to paid membership (like Build My Rank, Authority Link Network, Linkvana, and High PR Society) are easier to spot -- though not without cost.
The way we can pick out the domains in these networks is to create content with a shared unique phrase (or link to a decoy domain). Once this content is published and indexed, we can scrape Google for listings containing the target phrase. Once we have the list of URLs where our content has been published, we can cull out the domain names and add them to a match list.
With links classified into groups, we can now export lists that all have the same tactical approach to duplication. That makes it super easy to outsource this stuff. Send the list of blog comments to someone (or a team of people) and have them start matching links. If you're particularly daring, you can completely automate this using Scrapebox -- it all depends on your personal ethics and risk tolerance.
Same thing with web directories -- these are links that can be acquired with brute force, so commit lower cost resources into acquiring them.
Sidebar, footer, and blogroll links are most likely paid links, part of a private blog network (hopefully we've matched the domains and reclassified those), or possibly valid resource lists. Contacting webmasters to find out what it takes to get a link in those areas requires a little more finesse, but with a little guidance, junior team members can handle these tasks.
If they match our private blog network list, we can submit posts through on those networks.
A Word of Caution
Be careful who you copy. The site I referenced in this article has already been dropped by Google (I wouldn't have published this if they were still ranking). I suspect it was a manual action, since the site had a pretty stable three months at the top (even in the age of Panda). Google just can't allow low quality sites to outrank billion dollar brands for high visibility terms, and I believe they took corrective action to create a better user experience for the search terms this site ranked for.
It's possible that they didn't just implement this on a domain level, but instead stripped the sites that linked to AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com of their ability pass juice. That would mean that if you were duplicating this site's links, you'd be out of business too. Always weigh the risk against the reward and NEVER gamble with a client's site without getting approval (in writing) from them that they are comfortable with the risk of losing all of their rankings.
Want to Analyze Links for Yourself? I've Got You Covered
Obviously, since I have the data for the site used in this case study, I've actually built the tool talked about in the "Using Semantic Markup..." section of this post. For my purposes, it didn't need a fancy design or multiple user management, and I ALMOST published this post without bothering to put that stuff together. Thankfully, some of my friends in the SEO community (Ethan Lyon, Mike King, Dan Shure, Nick Eubanks, Ian Howells) pushed for me to make this application usable by other people, so...
You can start analyzing links using Link Detective for your own projects today.
If you want to know when new features get rolled in to the application, just follow me at @eppievojt on Twitter. I'll also make note of it on my (infrequently updated) personal website, eppie.net.
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this - it's got to be one of the most thorough analysis of non-white hat on Moz, right?
Is this really such a big deal? Did anyone think that sites weren't ranking by building out thin sites and then buying/spamming links? This happens every freaking day in a huge number of verticals. Most times the sites don't rank in the long term because they don't deserve to. I don't "out" but c'mon, if you build a site like this you know you are building a crap site with a crap backlink profile and that sooner or later it's getting torched. If you don't realize that you are either naive, still operating as if it's 2006 or earlier, or in a dream world where this is still a sustainable business model. You can't build a site like this and expect it to be successful long term. Build it, expect it to get torched, and make your money while you can, if that's the way you want to run your business. Don't raise a hue and cry when it is outed or reported for spam because at the end of the day it IS spam and there is too much money at stake for the other sites around it in the SERPs to not try to get it torched. Wishing that you could still make money for long periods of time on crappy sites isn't going to turn back the clock. It isn't happening any more. Get over it. If you don't want to get torched, build a site that can't be torched because it's too good to get penalized. If you don't want to put in that effort, don't expect to rank for long.
What do you would happen if the site cannot be said as crap but having a crap backlink profile? I think that is the real issue ?
I'm thinking about trying out that tool, but I'll proably use a fake name. I don't want to give my info to anyone smart enough to have written this post. ;-)
Ahh, but you're still giving them URLs. :)
This got a good laugh out of me. Thanks!
Well played. Very comprehensive link analysis. Just a small anotation, but the keyword rich domain plays a huge role in this scenerio. Granted you did show a result for "Car" instead of "Auto". But becaue of the domain the tolerance for spammy links is much higher. The combined total of links with the full term "Auto Insurance Quotes" comes to 37% of their links. If the domain didn't carry that phrase then I don't believe the site would have made it that far. Just a thought. And still a great post.
The presence of "auto insurance quotes" in the domain name most likely allowed for variations of that text to be heavily used in the anchor text without incurring a penalty. Likewise, "car insurance quotes" is a term that is semantically related and has minimal character changes from the domain, so that may also have allowed for some overoptimization of anchor text. Domain names are still very important.
That said, it's not an EMD so it didn't get a huge rankings boost from the presence of keywords in the domain. It just may have allowed a more aggressive approach to anchor text.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I agree with you that keyword rich domain helps the website to get ranking early than others who dont have but what do you say that can it be done without keyword rich domain? BECAUSE I had visited a website few years back where the owner of the website puts the latest link of articles on home page as well as the on the blog. So, it got high ranking due to high crawliing rate (Home Page) although content was poor.
a great insight Thomas
I'm so happy that Eppie did this for a variety of reasons.
First because Eppie is awesome and more people should know about him.
I've been trying to sell a variety of people on the idea that this is the type of actionable functionality SEOs want in order to know exactly what they should go after. I feel like this type of analysis is what both Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO are missing.
And I feel like that layer that Link Detective and Link Research Tools adds to them is the future.
Very well done man.
-Mike
I had the opportunity to beta this tool a bit, and talk with Eppie about all the applications it has - not just in link building, but in really carving out more info on your niche and competitors. It digs deeper into fluffy data and gives you something you can instantly create strategies with.
In my opinion, this is the most useful SEO tool to come out in a long time. People, get on this.
Thanks, Bill! I definitely appreciated your willingness to put the tool through its paces and suggest some possible features for the future. Hope to work that stuff in soon!
Couldn't agree more Bill. This is really going to help fill the "free link tool gap" with Yahoo Site Explorer gone.
Awesome post, Eppie. Thanks for sharing all your hard work with the masses. I've always been a bit lost on the private blog network stuff and those couple of paragraphs really shed some light on the subject.
Also, I'm kind of obsessed with the Link Detetive data. It makes me happy.
Side note, did you have a mustache when you put all this together?
I think that part of this tool was mustache-fueled, now that you mention it. Not one of my better looks.
I can't wait to have a play with the link detective tool... Every SEO loves a new gadget!
I hope you like it... and I hope it holds up under the weight of the traffic SEOmoz and Twitter are sending it. Fingers crossed.
FYI: The features of the tool have been available for years (ie. 4 or 5) in a number of other tool suites, notably hub finder / Linkdex.
I know this site is chalk full of Google cheerleaders, but let's be real:
I'm really surprised that Google is taking such an active stance on these blog networks.
You guys know this is all a double edged sword right?
They are penalizing so many sites that share the same type of link profile (blog networks, etc), it opens up a WHOLE new game for SEO's (albiet totally unethical).
I'm talking about Negative SEO and it's an extremely scary thing for legitimate site owners. And it's so easy to do these days, that it's almost hard NOT to do it. And trust me, it wasn't always this easy to out your competitors. It was actually very hard and very costly to do less than 6 months ago.
Not so, anymore.
There is a whole world out there than many of you don't even know about - or care to know. But you will.
SEO forums are amass right now with people "outing" their competitors with bad links. Google has painted such a pretty picture for SEO's looking to out their competitors.
Good job Google.
Honestly, if I wanted to, I could spend about $1000 and out EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY COMPETITORS on page 1 for terms I am going for. That $1000 would turn into over a 10,000% ROI for me. Lucky for them, I would never do it. But the fact that I CAN, and the fact on how EASY it is, is very scary to me.
There is one specific site that is ranked higher than I am for the majority of the terms I go for, and I personally know the owners. They are a $20+MM business per year, with over 50 employees, with families and children that rely on their paychecks. The past couple of months, I've been showing them exactly what is happening in the SERP's right now. And there's nothing they can do to stop it if someone had a bad day (or good, depending on how you look at it).
And I know that there are a LOT of people out there that wouldn't skip a beat if they had the chance and knowledge to out me or someone else competing with them. And right now there ARE a lot of people that are doing this. A lot more than before.
Again, good job Google.
I understand there is innocent fallout in any type of decision that affects a lot of people, but this is pretty crazy ridiculous.
Do I think this will last? No - I think Google is smarter than this.
But the fact that is IS happening, and happening a lot more than before, is scary enough for me.
Negative SEO does exist, especially in particuarly spammy/competitive spaces. I know we're past all the white/black hat stuff, but white hat just doesn't want to believe that people can be that evil. They can, and I've seen it first hand.
In the words of Keyser Soze, The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
your text worth more than the article! :) Excellent comment!
Eppie, your tool lacks a privacy policy that I can find. How will you be using the data which you are collecting from the SEO community? (some of which operate all shades of SEO).
Here, this one is only a month old or so... it should suffice: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v_M0RCeDfjAJ:www.linkdetective.com/PrivacyPolicy.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk
I'll put a privacy policy up tonight (or tomorrow morning at the latest) once I resolve a few bugs that appear to have cropped up while I was out this evening. I'll also get around to making options for people to delete projects and CSVs, rename projects, delete their entire account, and choose their own password if they need to reset it. I know these are all kind of standard features, but I've been pushing pretty hard just to get what's currently live done.
Until then, know that I'm not going to send you spam or market affiliate products to you. The system does send emails to your account (to let you know when a report's done processing, if you try to reset your password, and when you first set up an account). I may send out emails if there's any planned interruption in service or something similar. I won't be creeping through your CSVs or anything.
Hope that helps for now.
Thanks. I am mostly wondering if you will be logging sites which are analized for your own analysis. It is one thing for SEOmoz to analize the link graph it has from its index of links, it is another for a tool to acquire data from submissions and then use that for global trend analysis. If that is the goal, then more power to you, just want to know before I start running sites through it.
What concerns me is the lack of being able to delete projetcs, or shutting down an account, etc. I suggest these should be priority.
No user control?
The reverse DOM method is genius. The tool seems down right now but I love that you gave it away for free. Nice work - very smart stuff!
So genius I can't quite get my head around it! Fortunately there smarter people out there that can do this sort of analysis for us.
Fascinating.
But a crucial piece of the puzzle is missing.
None of us knows if this low quality site and its sleazy tactics are working.
How many people actually coughed up their contact info to such a crappy-looking site?
And how much did the site spend to get near the top?
Are the site creators diabolical genisues making money hand or fist?
Maybe. But they could also have failed. We just don't know.
Side note: this kind of stuff always reminds me of students who go to great lengths to cheat in exams, when it would have been so much easier to study. And also more virtuous.
AGREED! 100%
Good point Daniel, specifically the site spend part. If they're "smart" enough to get a site like that so high I don't doubt that they had a decent monetization plan lined up, but the amount of money that had to go into getting it there is the real mystery.
I have to Thumbs Up any post that not only points me towards a new tool to analyze activity, but also uses the word "Awesomesauce"
I appreciate the sharing of your tool and assume it still works all fine. I read through a lot of these comments and am confused about the criticisms because you seem to be pretty transparent about everything and a pretty respected member of this community. Maybe I am just a n00b though
WOW! Great Article! 4 million per month for three months? $12 million ... Maybe black hat isnt that bad after all.
Haha bold statement dseom. Fortunately, many of us see the short lifetime of sites like this and stick to doing things properly but I suppose you wouldn't need to if you made $million in 3 months!
Excellent post and comment responses Eppie! This is really looking to be the new age of link analysis...where 2 years ago we would evaluate the footprint based on the .com/.edu/.org breakdown this takes it even further with the semantic elements you referenced. Have you ever looked at these older variables and pivoted across the semantic elements, perhaps to prioritize which you might be more comfortable replicating? For example, if you know the competitor is doing blog commenting and you only want to replicate that across .org or .edu. Would be interested in any thoughts you might have on the value-add (if you think there is one, that is) of filtering across this type of variable as well.
Thanks again, truly truly impressed with the quality here!!
Just a quick question, i doubt ill get an honest response. But were u involved in reporting him to get him removed so that you could make this post? Seems weird that you would have screenshots from before of him ranking, unless you purposely planned this out.
I am also curious about this question.
I can think of only one plausible white answer, although perhaps there are more - perhaps he had a few or several of these from various keywords or industries, and just had to wait for one to fall on its own before using the example.
Hey Eppie - thorough post, thanks for the details on this garbage site that we're all seeing for something we're targeting. It's funny/sad that sites can build success ($4m/month sigh) on the back of spam. I understand why this was written up after the site was penalized. At the same time, I will try & out in a heartbeat if spam is above my client. It's clients who pay bills, right? How long would legit SEOs keep clients if they said "well, I have the opportunity to out this trashy site to help get you results, but I'm not going to because it's like bunting to ruin a no-hitter for my industry, ya know? sweet..." Trust would instantly vanish.
Do you think if the site was running authentic content and other mediums that contribute to a healthy algorithim crawl they have had a better chance of keeping their rankings - or since the vertical is so highly competitive the manual removal was their doom to begin with?
Car insurance is about as high profile a search term as you're going to see, so when you start ranking for head terms like that with lousy content, you're asking for a manual audit. If the site was legit -- say it was State Farm or Nationwide doing this, Google might never have a reason to manually review it... so they may have been able to get away with it. If they would have been less aggressive and only ranked for long-tail terms, it might have been a sustainable strategy.
On the other hand, we've seen huge brands like JC Penny and BMW get slapped in the past before when they were caught behaving badly.
This is a really good question...Eppie, what are your thoughts?
I've seen sites in less competitive spaces ranking well with the help of low quality link profile. But with passable content. Still it's frustrating to see them out rank us because it is a very difficult decision to make if we should follow their path or not.
I think you are being a little dismissive when you say "low quality content". Visit the site and look yourself . 1350 words of absolutely bang on optimized and specific content.
Low quality for human readership. Well maybe, but that's debateable (and subjective) but for Google it's brilliant - and despite what you might think - there is a LOT. 1350 unique on one URL would put this URL in the top 3% in terms of static content quantity. (most of the sURL's with more are blogs, blog rolls have more - but then they are blog rolls).
Good match dmoain name, a decent amount of optimized content. Decent links at the bottom to authority sites in the field and continuous link manufacturing over a long period of time.
I look at the sites around it for "cheap auto insurance" (from my geo loc in the UK)
https://www.chooseautoinsurer.com/ is number one
Seriously? This is worse. 150 words of 100% advertising.
I scan down the page of results and see URL after URL of near zero content/100% advertising or directories with dozens of outbound links to URL's with little or no content and overt commerciality that offer zilch/nada/nothing new to a browser "Buy insurance her - click for more" picture of pretty girl in car and a menu.
Most of them with under 200 words and in every case (i checked them all - it is in EVERY case from my geo) it is pure and unadultarated self advertising. It offers nothing what-so-ever.
Should they rank just because they are big business? Not in my view they shouldn't.
My only question when I look at the top 10 in my Geo loc is why the site you've picked on here isn't number one rather than number two. And that's probably a question the webmaster is asking himself.
So this site might be "trash" but at least it's "something" and maybe "something" should rank over "nothing"
Why do you assume the car insurance site that's no longer ranking is garbage?
Is it just because you don't recognize the name? Because they're not a corporate entity who's spent millions branding themselves with a lizard or "Flo" or "mayhem" commercials? Do those ads really help you decide who the most reputable car insurance company is?
Can i ask a question of the "white hat" community - what would you offer a small business owner who only has $150 - $500 / month to spend on internet marketing? I mean, what sort of value could you provide them that would actually work to help them increase their sales and that you as an SEO specialist can make a profit from?
Thank you so much Eppie!
Finally a REAL answer for the dozens upon dozens of "How is this site ranking?" questions that invariably are asked in Q&A! I have to say that being able to turn those sometimes frustrating threads into a true "teachable moment" by pointing people to your detailed explanation and giving them the tool that will let them see for themselves is pure gold :)
Thank you, thank you and thank you again!
Sha
I really don't get how SEO's think any link analysis type post is pure "gold". No doubt the tool is cool, well done. But the information in the post is pretty sub standard. Site ranks for competitive keyword with crappy links, site get's nailed by Google. Private blog networks or the ones you listed still work (or some of them do). Nothing new there. I swear some of the SEO community never run private projects and try this stuff out or they wouldn't be so shocked with posts like this.
Also, I don't understand what you mean by duplicating links from private blog networks. Where are you adding the unique phrase ? If you are adding a unqiue phrase to a piece of content to track where that posts gets seeded e.g if you already using a blog network that allows members to sign up (I assume not your own private one or else you would know where you are posting to), then that's pretty common place. But I don't get what you mean by using a unique phrase to identify a private blog network that you are not currently part of. If you don't have access to my network, how are you adding a unique phrase to posts on my network. Maybe I have got you all wrong on that point.
"match our private blog network list, we can submit posts through on those networks."
Again, how are you doing that. If I own a private blog network I am seeding my own posts and have comments turned off. How are you getting anything on my network? Do you mean identifying private networks that allow members to sign up e.g. SEONitro, LinkVana etc etc. Save yourself some time, there are plenty of forums that will telly you which ones still work.
Also, it's totally inaccurate to take the assumed value of this keyword and say it's probably worth 4 million based on SEMRush. The conversion rate of this keyword would be horrible and who knows how much the CPA offer is paying out.
But, hey, cool tool and I'll give it a whirl :)
Since I used the term "pure gold" in my comment I'll assume you were referring to me. If that is the case, you might like to take another read of what I wrote, since the comment was specifically about being able to use this post as a resource for the hundreds of people who ask the "why does this rank?" question in SEOmoz Q&A.
In the majority of cases the people asking the question are not experienced and have difficulty understanding the deeper layers of ranking influence. There are often cases where other members have made a significant commitment of time and energy to help them understand how to dig into the influence of this type of linking behavior.
As a member who does not make this kind of time investment in Q&A I can certainly understand that you may not see the value in the post that I do, but for me personally, the post and the tool will be a resource that actually gives people the ability to do this kind of investigation for themselves. That, for me, is pure gold.
Sha
Hi Sha,
Apologies but I never even read your comment so I meant nothing personal towards you. I am interested though, as a result of this post, how will your link building strategy change or what did you learn to help build more links for your sites? I am honestly interested and wonder did I miss something in the post.
Also, there are some glaring things in the post that didn't make sense, especially around the blog network, which didn't get answered.
Again, sorry if you felt my comment was directed to you, not my intention at all.
Thanks
Kieran
To me, the meat of this post is the section about using semantic markup to classify link types. I'm not super surprised that very little discussion has centered around that topic, since it's pretty technical and more developer-focused, but that's the area that I believed would add the most value in terms of ongoing practical application for working SEOs.
The idea works two ways -- if you're looking for easy links, you use it to spot competitor link types that are easy to duplicate, then you make sure you're in the same places. So, you submit to the same directories and comment on the same blogs, etc.
But you can also use it the opposite way. Clear out the easily identified link types and focus on the remaining "unknown" links. There's going to be some garbage in there, but this is also where the best contextual links will appear. Focusing on these can reveal PR angles competitors have used to gain news coverage, blogs they've guest posted on, things they've been able to do to elicit legitimate contextual links... that's all very helpful stuff.
As for the specific issues you raised about the post:
Okay - here is what I do not understand. Google creates this crap and we do what we have to do to rank and everyone gets pissed. They started link popularity, not us. All we did was provide what they wanted so that we could dominate the ranks. They change the game and we change tactics to match.
While this is not my site (would not claim such crap), I do have sites (that provide quality information to consumers) that rank #1 and #2 for highly competitive and highly profitable keywords. My sites are well done and provide quality info/service to consumers. I do not promote crappy acai or other scam weight loss products nor do I promote work at home crap or other scams that fill the web. In fact the only thing anyone can complain about is my black hat seo.
All I am doing is proving Google what they want. Think about it. Google says one thing, but wants/allows another. I stopped drinking the Googlaid a long time ago and have profited very niceley from it.
Together, my high quality sites and heavy black hat seo provide me a nice after tax six figure income every year and have for the past few years. This allows me to spend quality time with my wife and kids. While you guys are busting your butts working 50-60, even 70 hours per week. I literally work only 20-25 hrs per week. While you guys are racing to make it to little league practice, I am coaching the team and spending all the time I can with the kids and enjoying life to the fullest.
The only difference between you and I? I do what is needed to rank. Once again, I am giving Google what they want, not what they say the want. So dont blame me for doing what Google wants/allows instead of what Google says. At the end of the day, all I am doing is playing Googles game and winning.
My advice to all the haters. Stop drinking the Googlaid and come to the dark side of reality. Your stress levels will drop and your bank account will fatten.
Rank and Bank
Black Hat Affiliate
PS - Nice advertisement for Link Detective!
There are methods and hacks that allow you to rank high. The problem is, their algorithms get more and more sophisticated every day and they have millions of $$.
Great break down of the tactics used by these guys to rnk their site. Got to give them credit, even if for a short period they managed to achieve som pretty impressive rankings
The real question is...'if the site was quality and still built with these spammy high velocity techniques where would it sit'
Might still be up there. You can't punish a domain with bad links. Ive build with crazy link velocity on both spammy and decent sites. The content of the site played more of a part whether it got dropped at all. When building with high velocity, the most important thing is to keep it up, otherwise when the links drop off that's when it looks unnatural.
Hi eppie, do you not think that the blackhat community will get stronger from this post? You have given many people inspiration to cheat the way to the top of google.
Seomoz staff, do you honestly think that you should be promoting a thread like this?
It's really interesting to see Google has now deindexed the majority of 'blog network' providers - that were mentioned in this post. Build My Rank is gone, as is Link Authority Network & a few others. I've always looked at these tools, and even trialed them out, but it never felt right.
It doesn't take much algo magic to find these 'footprint free' blogs - they have hundreds of posts that link out to a range of unrelated, sometimes low quality sites. Must stick out like preverbial dog's balls on the authority graph. Hey! here's a site that links out to 300 other sites without any rhyme or reason.
Meanwhile the black hatters / grey hatters have all kinds of conspiracy theories floating about! Sorry state of affairs! How about you take that money and time invested into 1000's of 150 word posts and actually create something of value...? :)
Great post, very interesting throughout.
I've noticed in the Australian market these tactics are still used a lot - we seem to lag somewhat behind Google US. Only a matter of time before we catch up though (and finally good content becomes king...)
Agreed Bradkrussell, Australia is really behind.
Thanks very much for this post! Very interesting, I see websites like this all the time in Google search results.
Hello,
I just noticed that this website doesn't rank anymore 2 nd on google for "car insurance". Would google have done something to it following this article ?
Does anyone have the same thing or is it just from my location ?
Read the article again. Cringe.
Hi eppie,
How long does a link report usually take? It's been 8 hours already and the report is still not complete.
They usually take only a few minutes to run but there's a bit of a backlog due to the high volume of traffic on the site. The bottleneck is at the database -- too many concurrent connections being made, causing the analysis to operate at a much slower rate. I'm hoping to get the backlog processed overnight, as I've implemented a few changes to how some processing is executed.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get to it throughout the day as my primary responsibility is to my employer. I was able to tweak a few things over lunch and squeezed in a support call to the hosting company to resolve a few issues, but the rest of the fixes will have to be implemented tonight (and some more over the weekend).
Sorry for the delay -- I'm trying to get things moving faster again.
Hi Eppie, Thanks a gazillion for sharing your link analyzer tool with the rest of us :) I have already stuck my hands in it, to know what my competitors are upto, in link building terms. Great write-up. I have been facing the Private Blog network quite a bit when working with one of my clients, however the networks i have noticed are not as sleek and smart as they should be and can be spotted easily by their on-page content itself.
Good advise you gave about 'Being careful about whom to copy'. There's a Indian proverb that says that 'Even to copy you need brains' that one fits here perfectly. Thanks again for shring your awesome tool :)
I'm always keen to try out new link research tools and I'd like to take a look at this one but your website is just too buggy for me (anyone else?). I can't get past the error messages, I've done the new password thing again and again. But I'm still getting "An error occurred"
I'm glad I wasn't the one to have to go through the manual link process, but thanks for giving access to the tool. You do have to be very careful in SEO and I don't think any SEO should do anything that might risk a client's rankings with or without permission - because that's not acting in the client's long-term interests.
That being said, thanks for the intelligence - extra insight is always helpful.
Really interesting post! It amazes me how poor quality websites rank highly in SERPs. There are many insurance examples that I could list here but for teh sake of professionalism I shall not.
It really does seem like google penalises 'the goos guys' by allowing these poor websites to out rank legitimate, quality sites.
I wish they'd concentrate more on their quality scoring (outside of AdWords)!
Sorry guys - rant over.
Thanks again for taking the time to write this post!
"Google just can't allow low quality sites to outrank billion dollar brands for high visibility terms..."
I don't like this statement at all, the term low quality helps it a little, but its an ugly thought.
A wonderful example of sharing, Eppie, and I think we all appreciate the time it takes to effectively communicate your findings. Well done!
*Remove*
Great article, great tool! I've had many-a-headaches doing this process manually with opensiteexplorer data, so THANK YOU for creating a tool that automatically breaks it down!
As for the haters in these comments, I wonder what the reaction would have been if this exact tool was made available by SEOmoz???
So with that....when will this be rolled into SEOmoz/Open Site Explorer? :D I'd +1, Like, Pin, and Tweet that all day long.
Great stuff Eppie. Having worked across many of these 'lead generation'' industries, it is amazing what some sites/companies get away with. I am always amazed at the low quality of the link profiles of some high ranking sites. Simply search for 'payday loans' and do some link analysis and you'll see Google is not doing it's job scrubbing out sites with horrendous backlink profiles.
Thanks, Justin. There's no doubt that Google's not nearly as efficient at catching these types of things as many would have us believe. I think it's pretty staggering that this site was able to last as long as it did in such a high profile niche and you're definitely on point with some of the other lead gen industries having similar SERPs.
Just awesome post! Eppie, you are the best link investigator I've ever know ;) Good job!
Nice case study Eppie and what a great way to introduce your link analysis tool - Link Detective. I think it is content like this that makes SEOMoz the great community that it is and I always like the fact that other members are regulary intoducing us to their tools, which I like to have a play with. I know it has been dropped now, but it always amazes me when you see overtly spammy websites ranking for competitve terms. Good thing is they tend to get caught in the end as this demonstrates - hence why I like to keep my hat white - patience is a virtue as they say and I have found it to pay off.
Loved the post. tried using the tool you suggest and am having problems. Any tips?
Interesting analysis of that website. I don't know if I learned too much... other than spamming your way to the top doesn't work well as a long term strategy.
Seems as though you've learned quite a bit actually. :)
Eppie, thanks for the great article. Just a few days ago I delved into the same issue in my niche. I research and check and then blog about issues in my niche, using my grad school education and life experience to deliver superior content, but when dirty garbage takes two of the first three spots in the SERP for high searched keywords (with an exact match, hyphenated domain) I started fuming. This junk has been ranking for over a month. I was surprised that Google would let it rank so well and so quickly (link building effort of that site started in late October).
I wonder the efficacy of a Webmaster Tools Spam Report. As 129 sites with 80 to 90 percent of them being networked blogs should raise some algorithmic eyebrows, especially when content repeats on most of the ugly sblogs. The bad part is, most of these so called blogs have a PR3, and that's an average. Most are on domains that were not renewed.
Hey Google, we've had a great run, I post killer content - well researched BTW - and you rewared me, you still do. But, I didn't think those searching for answers in my niche would have to eat garbage before a significant minority of searchers would finally find the treasure that is for the taking on my site.
I hope that junk will eventually be easier to spot and eradicate. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope that someone is reading AND doing something on our behalf at the Google SPAM Team.
Great article but I need to point out the following snippets of statements you made: “a situation where several billion dollar brands got stomped by a low quality site for some of the most competitive (and valuable) terms online”. “Google just can't allow low quality sites to outrank billion dollar brands for high visibility terms”.
Although I agree with your point that the site’s quality was low, I don’t agree that billion dollars brands in any way should constitute top positioning in the search engines. You will notice that you only compare between those two. What about the small and medium sized businesses, who’ve been working hard to outrank these big brands? Don’t they deserve a chance? Otherwise, many of us should throw in the towels and look for a different niche. I’m sure many SEOs here will agree with that, after working hard to promote small businesses to top positions.
The fact that we can take small business and outrank big brands is the reason why so many SEOs are passionate about what they do.
Ditto for a lot of our competitor research, lots of low quality links ranking very highly that is.
Loved the example you have shown, its an important one because the terminology for which its ranking is one of the highest in the genre and is working quite well. I just hope Google wakes up a bit and try to kill such spam sites before they even reach first page.
Just a few thoughts on this ... I can appreciate that "reverse engeineering" a sites backlink strategy has been and continues to be a viable opportunity for SEO'ers. I also understand what the tool does by essentially crawling and harvesting actionable data on a webpage for link building purposes.
My issue is where the "black hat" essentially comes into play. The screenshot from Majestic is a dead giveaway. The site topped out at aquiring 50,000 back links in a single month. So much for link velocity ... just at a quick glance I see 200,000 backlinks within a handful of months. There is no way a person or agency sat back and created this many backlinks.
So there already exists tools/resources (like scrape box) which focus on quantity rather than quality. In this example karma caught up ... but there seems to be a more systemic issue here and even the most honorable "white hat" SEO'ers cant compete with (at least in the short run).
I gave Link Detective a spin. More than anything else, it showed me that all the techinques that I've been told time and again were spammy and outdated, including comment spamming and reciprocating/buying links on really lousy directories are at the heart of competitors' strategies that are kicking my butt with outdated websites that offer zilch in the way of content. What gives? Should we just give up and start comment spamming the crap out of everyone?
You sure that this was not your site you were "ragging" on? Why would you put someones site on your home page without first asking their permission. This site owner may not want to be on your site and it seems to me that your setting yourself up for some unwanted legal action.
Just sayin
This is the saddest thing to see you do your website looks professional having great information but still end up never show up in the SERP, for me i always remember that quality content plus link juice is a must to for you be able to compete in SERP.
Who know's? Maybe one day the white hats will say "we told you so" to the black hats, but the fact that a crappy link profile can get you ranking is undeniable. I guess I fall in the grey hat category because my thought is that if it gets you ranked now, do it... wisely, of course. However, at the same time, I prepare for the day that the garbage link profile no longer works by employing the white hat techniques that Goolge says it wants now, so if that day ever comes, it won't hurt so bad... hopefully.
Talk about an eye-opening post to someone as green as I am with SEO. I really appreciate you sharing the tool for community usage.
Looks like Google knows all about BMR - https://www.buildmyrank.com/news/its-been-a-great-run
When I wanted to test the new LinkDetective.com tool I did an OSE export for the domain in question, www.AutoInsuranceQuotesEasy.com. It is currently at 9,600+ Linking Root Domains... impressive :) in a bad way, of course, but impressive none the less.
I remember an article on this very blog which described link bait and infographics as working great and the numbers showned in those cases as success where in the hundreds of LRDs. So how do we fight this? I can't really see as a solution the "get the same non-editorial links" strategy.
I wish you hadn't published this :) Nice list of tools to use for link analysis.
Hi Eppie Vojt,
https://www.rentalhunt.com/
Can you check this website, too? They are still ranking for 'rental houses' at #4 in Google even after all quality updates Google made this year. This website is full of keyword stuffing and mispelled words used to implement rankings.
Do you see any good factor for which they are ranking at top?
Excellent stuff but I have a question regarding Magic Submitter (MS) and the like mentioned previously.
I have an authority affiliate site, 2 years old, with good content and built purely with white hat techniques. This site ranks at position 5 on Google for one main keyword but the rest of my key words are ranking pages away. My site has only 7 (yes, seven) backlinks and I am looking at MS as a possible solution to improve that situation by automatically submitting good content over a lengthy period of time.
I am a one man band and do not have the time or resources to manually submit tons of content myself. My intention in using MS is therfore honourable in so much as I would use it as a substitute for a workforce that I do not have. I would slowly submit content regularly using my real name, bio etc instead of the fake profiles generated by MS which should give the submissions real credibility. Does this sound realistic or am I being naïve? Should I use the fake profiles but with real email accounts.
With the exception of the comment by BlackHatAffiliate on 19th March it seems to me that ANY use of tools such as MS is bad. Is that really the case? Or is it just assumed (by Google too) that anybody using such tools must be either building crappy websites or touting for SEO business.
Before I start wasting what little time and money I do have, your thoughts on how to use link building tools ethically would be appreciated. The last thing I want is to start using the tool and then have my previous hard work slapped by Google.
Thank you
Neill
Hello Sir ,
Thanks for sauch a grate contribution for those who wants to learn SEO. To be very frank i am new in SEO. I have a site for my own, Its a health related article site. I have completed On page opticmiazation for my site. But i am not sure how to go for off page marketing for this site. Its new and dont ask for the visitor what i have right now. As i said erlier its Health related sites, My topic is weight loos. Please give me some guideline how will start marketing for my site. If you want i will sahre my site link for your suggestuion. Thank you.
Brilliant article, but my question is this. Anyone involved in SEO will have come across sites like these a hundred times, is it worth waiting around for Google to spot them or is it worth flagging the site to notify them?
I copied links of bad quality sites that ranked better than me and after penguin google killed me and still supports the bad sites, though they lost a bit.
The LinkDetective that you use and referred actually bills your credit card forever. It's a scam, with no support or contact response.
Just email support and you can have your subscription canceled. If you suspect your message wasn't read (or went into spam), contact me on Twitter with your username and I'll get you squared away.
That was fast. Thanks, all is right now
No worries, man. I try to be accessible but occasionally a message gets missed or inadvertently filtered. I'll always make good on it and am liberal about refunding dissatisfied customers. I've got no interest in making money off of unhappy people.
Eppie, I wanted to cancel my subscription and I contacted you via emails & facebook messages, but you don't reply and continue charging me. I can't send you a private message via Twitter. Hey, please cancel my subscription right away.
Eppie, I sent you my account info via Twitter DM two days ago, but no response yet. If you don't cancel my subscription soon, my credit card will be charged again. You have already charged me several times by ignoring my email to [email protected]. Please make an action as soon as possible.
I don't know which strategy is correct but for me link building still the way to gain website rankings. I saw many niche who rank higher on serp but their links got thousands that comes from different spammy sites.
Thanks for your effective article.This is first time reading SEO.I thank this is very important for each and every one.Thanks for share it.
https://autoinsurance6.com/
Hi Eppie! After reading your post, I am now very interested to use your tool. I really love the idea about this tool. I believe that it is a valuable tool for analyzing competitor's link strategy. Keep up the good work and looking forward for another great post!
Very thorough indeed. Its amazing how the site still got to number two when the links were built through article marketing, blog commenting and the sidebar links. But… I'm glad that Google took notice.
It's a great post/analysis and I truly enjoyed reading it... however, has anyone checked this junk site in Semrush recently???? It's not competing for "car insurance" but it is doing well for a little longer tail keywords. The site's content did not even change... way to go Google...
Great Tool Eppie. It's a beautiful display of the link data. Too bad it found alot of dead links that need to be replaced!
Interesting to see in more detail how people can get rubbish sites ranking. I was under the impression that Googles recent Panda updates were there to try and prevent these kind of sites from ranking so high. I suppose the faster Google change their method, the quicker the spammers have to react.
Thanks for the great tool Eppie.
Your comment of "How is this guy ranking between big brands?" just solidifies the truth that Google and others favor big brands. How are you supposed to build a brand online if your competing with sites with tons and tons of natural links?
It's easy to criticize others tactics. Show me an example of a no name brand you have gotten to rank along big brands, for a competitive keyword, without doing the above.
Meh. I'm afraid you missed the point.
I'm not suggesting that a little guy can't or shouldn't rank between big brands. But it's clearly an anomaly, particularly in hyper-competitive niches like auto insurance. So when you see something like that -- a site doing the seemingly impossible, you wonder what they did to achieve it.
Let's stop trying to pick fights and start trying to have productive discussions.
I think that you dont make ur point so clear... If ur point is: "How this guy/company do that?" I tell u! Really simple... Competition research and Good BH backlinking service. I´ve done MANY times... Last forever? NO, but then u just do it again :)
If ur point is: Google algo is messed up... Yeah! That´s why rank for "good content" is SO AMBIOUOS"
U live in the US? Well If u check country google domains u will see TONS of google failers.. Rank site with other countries for products REALLY specific...
I hope u understand me
"How are you supposed to build a brand online if your competing with sites with tons and tons of natural links?"
You're kidding right? If you're asking that question, maybe you're in the wrong business.
We're participating on one of the most popular websites in the world (that ranks for one of the most competitive keywords in the world), simply because they care enough about their visitors enough to develop great products for us and offer a forum to share kickass content everyday. SEOmoz didn't start out as a big brand, hell, they started out as a blog.
As for no name brands, just check out Chris Warren's post about going viral. He mentions https://www.scirra.com/ which has had remarkable results simply because the company (2 guys) offered a great product.
Hahaha U r kidding! MOST business cant wait to do WH!
In what world do u live, dude! hahaha
The tactic here is start with moderate BH, and then go easy :) If u dont do that, the client fires you!
I imagine a local contractor in some city paying u one year without results? hahaha
Yeah right :D
Great post!
That was quite informative. Looks like Links exhange has transformed into Blog Commenting. Not really what Google wanted.. ;)
Hi Eppie,some very interesting and intriguing facts here. Can't believe that automatically produced links like "blog comments" can really have such great influence on SERPs! On the other side "Author bio box" is only 0,45% . That means that G still has lot to work on algorithm.Also, your article gave me few ideas for future SEO experiments. Great work here, thanks!
This is my first comment after reading SEOMoz for quite some time and I just wanted to say thanks for the superb write up. Brilliant.
And it just so happens that the Car Insurance is my favorite niche to use as examples when first explaining SEO to clients. I'm adding this to the arsenal - thanks Eppie!
Thx for sharing, thx for your detective tool, a pleasure... :)
Oh, ah. That gave me a headache, due to the brilliance of the analysis. I've been doing a much-more-amateur version of this for a site that outranks one of my client's sites, despite having crap content and kinda crap everything else. What it DOES have going for it is the most common search term in the domain name, and some high-PR do-follow links from professional organizations. And some domain name age, and some vendor-provided images. I am almost done implementing the elements that seem to matter that I can directly influence, so we'll see how long they hold their position.
I think what thrills me the most about what you wrote is the reminder that other people out there are as gung-ho about this stuff as I am. My office mate completely glazes over when I start to yap.
LOVE the charts! Love the references to tools! No sleep tonight!!
A very good analysis! It looks like the anchor text distribution is perfect. I think this is the reason why it stayed on top.
We looked, read and analysed this website in 20 min but.. think about Google Quality Search team how they rigorously analyzed this website.
P.S. I'm waiting for semantic markup analysis to be finished. It looks like a real good tool. Thanks!
Insanely interesting read. Epic detective work.
Very thorough information! It'll be interesting to see what black hatters do after Google gets this issue under control..whenever that may be.
Hi Eppie,
I feel that your tool is a valuable tool for analysing competitor link strategy. To me the value comes from its ability to filter the links from open site explorer, to find where competitors have created good quality link. This will reduce the time wasted looking into poor quality links, so time can be better spend on learning from the good practices of competitors.
I hope you have an understanding hosting provider because I understand the load your site will be putting on their hosting environment.
Don’t get too dishearten by the sceptics. Keep up the good work.
If there is anything I can do to help, let me know.
Kieron
P.S. should I be thinking about rename all the classes and id to nondescript terms? ;-)
I've been talking about the need to a tool such as this for an age, even building a rudimentary version in house. The bucketing of backlinks by type has been a obviously missing piece of the puzzle for me for a while and it's great to see a public version of it go live.
Talk about a mixed reaction though, Wow!
I've been trying to boost our organic page rank and have followed the usual tips, create good content, guest blog, build good backlinks but it's not had the effect I've wanted. I did a little research into my competitors backlinks and found a huge amount came from commenting on various blogs - writing nothing much more than 'great article' or 'thanks for the advice.' It's rather frustrating and I'm in two minds as whether to adapt this strategy also. Will comment link work against you in the end?
Amazing research and easy to read article Eppie, I really enjoyed it.
I am actually dealing with some websites that outrank us in Google and couldn't see the reason why. Now I understand their technic.
Will also try the link detective tool, thanks so much for sharing all this :)
This is the best and most interesting post I have seen on here in ages, I havent commented in months.The things that I wonder about here is the decision to stop passing juice from sites that linked to this site, do you really thing they would have done this? Its a little harsh is a blog owner accepted a well written and relivent comment that then left a backlink on their site and off the back of that they lose their ability to pass juice. Its quite harsh to the blog owners and would take steps to enourage blogs to be nofollow and in turn damage the likelyness of people to leave comments and knock the whole social aspect of blogging!?Im a black hatter only these days so the effect on the sites I have forced links onto is of serious interest to me but should be to everyone else too
Hey Eppie,
Completely with you on wearing many hats analogy. I for one have used you CTR theme for many of my own very successful AdSense "niche" sites and at the same time I also do freelance SEO consulting for blue chip clients so no harm done:)
I do want to add that the manipulative blog network link building (combined with anchor text) is probably not as effective anymore since the latest Panda rollout last month which I believe was specifically targeting links from many of these paid blog networks.
Super interesting stuff here. I wasn't expecting you to share the tool - nice surprise at the end! Unfortunately I'm getting a server error right now - I'll give it a shot later. Thanks for sharing!
The tool's definitely been getting bombarded. I've made a few changes that I hope will improve stability under heavy load and will definitely make some additional tweaks over the weekend. For now, I need to hope this holds up for the rest of the work day, as I'm finishing up lunch and need to get back on the clock now.
I put in a CSV file with 10k links last night at 11PM...it's now 9AM and the report still isn't done. If this is how long it takes, it's never going to work for me.
It normally takes around 5-10 minutes for a report to process -- unfortunately there was an extended period where report processing was down but CSV upload was still functional yesterday. That resulted in a vary large backlog of reports that the system needs to work through before everything is back on schedule.
I know it's frustrating to wait but this should be a temporary setback.
To be honest, having dealt with a variety of crooked car insurance companies, I'm happy to put my ethics aside on this one and congratulate these auto insurance quote easy people. I take my (white) hat off to them.
Point taken, but then again, to whom do you suppose the AIQE people were selling the leads? ;)
Wow!!! Such a very great post. I really learn a lot by this post.
traffic $4 million... per month!
Hi Eppie,
This looks like an incredible tool, and I'm really excited to start exploring it a little. However, I'm having trouble signing up. Every time I try, it takes me back to the sign up and at the bottom of the page is says there was an error. The layout is a little off as well, with the sign up boxes not lining up properly and the error message was also a little weird. Wonder if these problems are somehow from the high level of traffic you're no doubt getting. Anyway, just thought I'd let you know! Thanks for a great post and tool.
@ Bucko - I experienced the same problem. If you go through the "lost password" drill, the replacement password will work.
Very nice article and very revealing. Thank you
Remarkable work - and your promotional link is well deserved. Thanks for sharing!
This is huge, we can't wait to put this tool to use. Just the brief sites we've run through this already has given some great feedback. Bravo!
Glad you like the tool. I'm all ears if you have any suggestions for improvement!
Superb post! I actually had a private Q&A question a couple of days ago where the site had a ton of spammy links from strong EDU sites, and the link-builder had done what you'd shown above with the garbage paragraph with a handful of unrelated outbound spam links.
The person was wondering why they suddenly saw a huge drop in traffic. My suspicion was a manual spam report, either about their site, or about one of the other sites that had also been in the mix of links in these garbo-paragraphs sneakily sprinkled about the web.
MichaelC - i am curious on that also, is the demotion of the rank most likely a result of the offending site being actioned against manually OR because the offending contributing garbage sites are devalued thus causing the drop of the site that is linked to them? Thus are Google more interested in the network than the individual?
I'm inclined to believe, based on the performance of another site apparently owned by the same individual, that a large portion of the linking domains were devalued, as this other site appears to have suffered a similar (but less severe) drop.
Strong work Eppie! Your post is making the rounds on Google+ by some pretty savvy SEO guys I track - so its good to see you're getting your just desserts for authoring such a strong analytics piece showcasing Link Detective. Nicely done - Neil
Nice work Eppie, that was an interesting read.
Absolutely killer post on the seamy underbelly of black-hat SEO. I'm anxious to start using Link Detectiveto uncover my competitors' strategies. Thanks!
This tool sounds really great, thanks Eppie.
It seems that contrary to public Google pronouncements, Nofollow link building does actually pass value.
Also, I have seen affiliates, like this insurance site, dominating on very competitive terms without the links to support their position. I always assumed they did some sort of 301-redirect from other strong domains or even hacking pages on authority sites and putting in a 301 redirect.
Any ideas on how to figure out if something like this is going on?
Great post. I think you're right about Google ceasing the linking domains ability to pass juice rather than slapping the domain itself. Otherwise, a competitor could buy a couple of thousand spammy sidebar and blog comment links for Geico and get them slapped.
I love the idea for this tool. There were a lot of WMT errors of links pointing to pages that don't exist anymore. I fixed that and redirected a bunch, but now I am starting to thinking I picked up some garbage links that were built years ago. One of my sites got a message from Google saying we have an unnatural link profile, but we haven't been doing any real link building to that site. I have been digging since yesterday to find the problem, and this is just another tool to help. Thanks!
How long does a report usually take? I added about 5K links, and it's been around 2hours.
Aha! the dreaded unnatural link email!
I recommend that you reply to Google with a complaint, explain to them that you don't control these 3rd party websites that contain the unnatural links. Explain how very unreasonable it would be for them to penalize your site in any way because of these 3rd party links that you had no idea about. might help, but google can do whatever they want.
Before i got my white hat on i used every spam seo trick in the book, but now i'm a changed man.
The reason why black hat SEO still exists is because it can work. I know that is so very tempting for many site owners, especially when you're working on a deadline, but I just don't feel like its worth it. Like you say, Google dropped that site from the SERPs.
definitly true for a clients site or if you are wanting to make sure you get a retainer each month but remeber:
$4 million... per month! (of traffic)
and also think if they got £2 per lead/£40 per sale 1 month is nice, there will be another 3 or 4 sites in other niches built at the same time and more in production, they are built to throw away
Great post!This is something I often notice in the niche I work in.
Best of multiple tools at a one place sounds like super amazing... Great Great Stuff!
traditional mfa site) You can find a lot of such sites if you collect in semrush micro-niche queries (for example How to get rid of {your word})
Very interesting post. Eventually these tactics will cease to work.
How do the do follow and no follow anchor text links impact this analysis?
A great post and even great gift with the Link Detective. I'll put it to use right away :D
Cool. I like the part where you out someone because they are ranking higher than the big dogs. Let's just allow the big insurance companies to take over every bit of space there is. I like the fact that some punk on his couch did something creative to outrank companies with multi million dollar budgets. That is the part of SEO that I like...
I am not supporting what the owners of this website did, but I am curious. Given the mechanization of much of the spammy type of links, how many hours would you estimate they invested in this project (excluding the business model itself)?
Eppie - Thanks for making the tool available. Hope it creates good karma.
$5-10k would be my guess and I imagine they made $100-200k per month while ranking for those keywords. How do I know? I work for one of the other companies ranking in that space.
linkdetective.com is down for me.
Thanks for the free tool. I'm getting a lot of "An error occurred / Application error" when I was logging in and setting up my first project. This SEOmoz post might have given your tool a little more attention than your server can take? I'll certainly be patient because Link Detective will save me tons of time.
Much appreciated, and evidently courageous to boot. I won't pretend to understand the politics of what's okay and not okay to talk about openly, but as someone who comes here to learn about SEO (which, I assume, is a big part of the target demographic), this is both fascinating and helpful.
Thanks for the post. I was always suspicious about directory listing. Everyone seems to be saying that the links acquired from there are not worthy the effort. What do you all think?
Greetings from https://www.iclickmedia.com.sg/
Thanks for the post, This only proves AGAIN the point that as a temporary solution, black hat spammy posts “seo” still works.
Now the question is what's going to happen with the latest update from Matt Cuts at SXSW about the "over optimization penalty".A few months ago we did a similar test to see where we get links from and believe it or not we spent time on removing links! Something I would not believe that is possible 8, 5 or even 2 years ago.
I'm going to give this tool a try - if it can be the OSE filter which I'm missing so much - it will be more than just great.
Awesome post, i am really excited to use your tool. was looking for someting like this
I am surprised a site like that was able to sit there for such a long time before getting dropped! Great analysis. I'm sure Google will be using these sites in determining the next big thing to target, which makes it easier for those of us who play by the rules.
Nice read!
I will try out your tool. I want to know thoughts on the (Anti-SEO) people are talking about. Where there are setting up blog networks to place competitors links to take DOWN their comperitors.
Thoughts?
backlinks, impressive case
Funny, I was running Virante's internal version of this right when I was alerted to it. Great to see a public tool. Would be nice if they allowed custom regex for things like uncovering widget campaigns.
Russ -- Great suggestion. I've added it to the list of potential features.
Eppie this is awesome. Really interesting way to look under the hood of some of these shady backlink profiles. Regardless of the shadiness of the links, I can't knock the hustle. I'm sure the owners of that site made bank for the 3 months they owned that 2 spot. Really psyched to fire up Link Detective.
Actually, I can knock the hustle. When you are maintaining a website that is involved in a very competitive industry, and you've been doing business in an ethical and "White-Hat" type of way, seeing competitors that are using shady link tactics outranking you is nothing short of sickening.
People that engage in these type of Black-Hat techniques are not only manufacturing a competitive edge in the SERPs, but they are also polluting the internet with their garbage.
To me, the usage of Black-Hat techniques is like using steroids in a professional sport. I've seen numerous companies use these techniques to gain ranking for their clients, but I'd like to see them explain to their client why one day their website went from a #3 position, to a #30 virutally overnight.
The last thing we need to do is glorify or give props to people who attempt to cheat the system. I can deploy these same tactics, I just choose not to because it dillutes my morals/ethics and professional capability.
That's all well and good but if the system itself is flawed and someone is ingeneuitive enough to exploit the cracks, who are we to judge? Obviously that ranking didn't last but I'm sure it was a lucarative decision even for a short time period. And to say that the car insurance industry is "ethical" is a bit ludicrous. I'm not losing any sleep over Geico losing a few bucks.
I too try and do things the write way by offering value to my customers and constantly pushing out quality content, but at the end of the day my goal is to win. So you can claim the moral high ground all day but I'm not going to knock the people that work hard to exploit a flawed system and profit from it. You think Google doesn't make unethical decisions on a regular basis? Search + Your World not including FB and Twitter data amounts to less relevant search results, all in the name of pushing G's social agenda. I choose not to drink the koolaid on this "good content is all you need" approach. It certainly works for some (like you and I) but unforetunately it's not the only way to get a ticket into the game...
If by "win" you mean doing things that are clearly against Google's Guidelines & Policy - that run the risk of getting your client penalized, then more power to you. I would just make sure that your clients are fully aware of the potential risks when using these techniques.
I fully understand that there are some situations where this tactic could be profitable on a very short-lived and temporary basis, for websites that have the sole purpose of having a very short life span.
And if your client is "down for the get down"...then by all means, I think it's excellent to know how to game the system if need be, but overall I think it's still polluting the internet.
I couldn't agree more. It's unbelievably frustrating to compete with this sort of thing.
Even more frustrating, however, is to hire what you think is a reputable web partner, only to find out later that they weren't. They always seem highly skilled in the beginning, as your ranking improves. Later, you may discover that success was due primarily to black hat tricks - not something to which you would have agreed.
For an (unaware) client, it's a straight up hit-and-run. No thanks. I'll take the long way home.
Thanks, Devin! I'd definitely be curious to learn what the site owners were able to pull down while they held the ranking. Given how long they stayed up there, I'm sure the reward was handsome.
Great post and very comprehensive link analysis. I'll give Link Detective a go, sounds like a very handy tool.
Cmon people! Now all SEO´s are saints?!
Google is indexer not a censor! Now ALL of you are agree with 1-10 SERPS only can be a multimillion dollar company? It is absolutly ridiculous! Internet IS NOT YELLOW PAGES!
What´s the difference when we fight against SOPA and this?
If a guy is smart enough ACCORDING with google rules, to rank a site WHY say: "SPAMMY SITE" Do u check the site? Really? I know, is NOT a multimillion corporate company... But what google say?
Ranking is a "POPULARITY CONTEST" What are the votes? BACKLINKS! So? This guy just do what GOOGLE say...
I dont write more, cuz my english sucks hehe
Whatever!
thanks Eppie, I'm off to rinse some snake oil URLs through Link Detective...
Don't limit yourself to "snake oil URLs." The tool can absolutely be used to spot great link-building opportunities more efficiently. Use it to filter out all the lower quality link types leaving a much smaller group of unknown links that you can evaluate by hand. You might be surprised to find some great linking opportunities in there.
WOW....a post on garbage ranking in SERPS, by someone who has created things like "CTR theme" to promote the GARBAGE himself. By analysing your testimonial on your CTR theme, it is quite apparent that you feel quite proud to introduce a thing which is spedcifically built for promoting adsense and giving the hell to user esperience. Comments like "How this garbage ranks: simply doesn't suit you. :) oh and if someone cares to do a link detective analysis on your site betterparenting.com, he or she will be surprised to see how much "quality" links you have acquired :)
TLDR: Black Hat SEO and spam comments still work. There's a reason blogs still get a ton of spam! This site might not last long (especially now that you've outed it), but they're probably making plenty of bank in the mean time.
....to give a TL;DR, I recomend actually reading ;)
"The site I referenced in this article has already been dropped by Google (I wouldn't have published this if they were still ranking)."
Good catch.
Well, looking at the SERPs, it looks like you ruined their day.
I don't see them in their #2 position anymore.
Ouch.
Yes and this was pointed out by Eppie in the second to last paragraph :)
"A Word of Caution Be careful who you copy. The site I referenced in this article has already been dropped by Google (I wouldn't have published this if they were still ranking)"
"Be careful who you copy. The site I referenced in this article has already been dropped by Google (I wouldn't have published this if they were still ranking)."
I WOULD have published it, and I would be the first to write an email to [email protected]. I am now trying to put insureyes.com on the main page of Google using completely white hat methods and it drives me mad when I find things like that. God, I have all those tools, Scrapebox, NoHandsSEO, Magic Submitter, etc. I could have made 10000 backlinks per day easily.
I personally think that Google spam filters are not perfect yet and I would really like to help them so us, the white hat guys would not extinct.
And yes, your post is great, thank you for that. A thumb up.
Thank you.
Slava Rybalka
slava, looks like you got a long long long road ahead of you.
Does that mean that you and the guys who put other 3 thumbs down support black/grey hat seo? I used all these tools before. Google spends millions of dollars on their spam team every year. If you build low quality backlinks to your site and hope to game their algorithm with these tools - ...
No the thumbs down is more than likely being willing to report someone because they are outranking you or you dont like what they do. Why do you have copies of scrapebox, NoHandsSEO, Magic Submitter? Have you played in the dark?
Thank you for your comment (+1). I did. Yes, I am a member of BlackHatWorld, and I used to blast my own WP sites with tons of crappy backlinks. I did mass social bookmarking, mass directory submission, mass backlinks from low quality article directories, link wheels, etc. I did lots of experiments and testing to see what works better.
At the same time I used to have a website for which I built links manually, and that site performed well. It got hit by Panda though, due to the lack of media and original content back then, but later the website recovered. But that's another story. Now I am using only white hat methods for the websites I promote.
Now I have come to a point of view, that if you play on the dark side, sooner or later bans happen. So there are 2 options: a) play in the dark and pray that Google won't hit you tomorrow or b) focus on user experience and create an interesting website, get links from relevant high authority websites, focus on content, etc. Which option is better? I have chosen the 2nd option and I can reveal my name. Can you? ;)
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that the author has designed themes specifically for affiliate & adsense sites?
I've also launched and sold https://www.betterparenting.com and https://www.flipwebsites.com, and I work full-time at a respected agency working on large SEO accounts. A guy can wear more than one hat... and they don't always have to be the same pure color. :)
Truth.
...because surely one can't make junk and know at the same time that it is, in fact, junk.
You had me all the way tilt almost the end, where you revealed this was an advertisement for a tool that collects leads, not an actual article. Nice job.Looks like you fooled the seomoz editors as well (but what do I know.. maybe you have a deal with them..this post does a pretty good job of promoting their tool too).
I did stumble a few times... thinking "wait, what did he just say? He sounded smart, but then he said that?" In some places you exhibited ignorance of what is really very basic and typical SEO.Like the part about duplicating 80,000 plus backlinks with a low paid worker, and the reference to "only one nav item" and some of the other critical comments about the site.
Now I see the craftiness, though. If the audience is relatively inexperienced with successful SEO, they would never notice that. The drama would keep them reading. Again, nicely done.
The fact that you think this remarkable... is odd. That you highlight the site's ranking as an anomoly, or outlier, or incorrect, is also odd. I have to assume you'd prefer a Google SERP full of major car insurance brands? That'd probably be the death of Google, and a los for consumers. True or not, this article reads as very naive. I don't know a single real world industry that relies on the big brands to actual market and sell their goods on their (usually poorly built) web sites.That's not how real business works. Real business is done with partners who specialize and deliver.
So before anyone calls out a site for "doing wrong", do yourself a favor and follow the money. Learn something about how business works (including the business called Google, and the business called seomoz). You "outsiders" sitting perched on high horses (some probably still in your pajamas siting at a broken desk in mom's basement) only make yourselves look foolish outing sites in public, and calling them spammers.
Those "big brand" car insurance companies will be paying more for leads tomorrow (since the lead collectors will have to rebuild their sites). Google of course will be fine... they ALWAYS make money, and even make more when you guys tout the Google Guidelines as law. Same for seomoz... as long as articles like this SOUND good to inexperienced players, seomoz makes money.
What about you? Did you make anything? Learn anything "real"? Or maybe you got sold on the promise of a new tool.. and entered your email address for a "free" signup.
Yawwwwwwwn...
I'm not going to speak to anything other than your assumption that Eppie has ulterior motives in presenting this tool.
I met Eppie at the NYC Moz Meetup in 2011. We were talking about coding and the things we'd built to make our SEO jobs easier. He told me about a tool he made that did reverse DOM traversal to classify links. I told him about one I'd build that classified links pulling a bunch of data and running natural language processing. We said wow that's cool and kept in touch.
Fast forward.
Eppie showed me his post on February 17th. Here's a screenshot of the original version: https://www.eppie.net/youmoz-preview.png
You'll notice the post includes no link to a live tool. It just hints at it being available in the future.
I said wow Eppie this is good work, but it would really drive it home if you made the tool accessible to the public with the post. So Eppie held off on the submitting the post to YouMoz and scrambled to throw a GUI on his tool so he could offer it to the community for use.
Some more facts:
Being snarky is cute and everything John, but you're not adding anything. You're taking shots at someone who made something actionable and just wanted to share it and that doesn't help anything but your ego.
^^ This guy is an incredible SEO and a GREAT friend! Thanks for having my back, Mike.
awwww so sweet :) now lets move to second step: exchange linkedin recommendation :)
Well done, Mike.
The point I'd like to make is that I'm happy to see that there are people among us that still do hard work and get results. Annnnd, then build a tool so you can do it too.
Haters gonna hate...
Eppie, about that mustache?
wow how completely utterly cynical without having any facts. I've been performing audits for years and wanted a tool that does almost exactly what this one does. There have been a couple that almost came close over the years but not really got there. Already, in it's first version, I'm finding it invaluable in our audit work. Being able to provide a visual reference to our link foot print recommendations is crucial in helping enterprise client VPs, EVPs and CEOs rapidly grasp the health of that foot print.
The fact that he links to the tool, to me, is a pure bonus above and beyond the actual article itself. Kudos to Eppie for having the innovative recognition of its value. And personally, I look forward to the day there's a paid version that provides even richer data visualization.
It's funny, as I was reading the article I was thinking "man, I hope this is building up to mentioning a tool that does all of this becuase I manually do it now!"
As for me, I'm also glad he linked to the tool and all the people that put their heads into making it.
With this tool, I won't need NEAR as much ibuprofen when doing competitive research! haha
Wa wa wa. : ( Someone shared value, knowledge, insight, and then offered his tool or product as a solution - and that sets you off. Content Cop? Communinest? Funny.
BTW I wanted to point out to everyone that I'm the "fooled" SEOmoz editor who not only approved this to go on YouMoz, but also promoted it to the main blog. I just wanted to set the record straight so if you want to call me names to my face you can. :)
I've promoted many posts throughout the years that have done more promotion of their own tools than this post did. In fact, I don't think he promoted the tool really at all.
There's no donation button on Eppie's site, but if there was one, I'd be ready to donate. I applaud him for sharing this and imagine his costs on this will not be insignificant.
You admittedly were not "fooled", so why play the victim? I said I didn't know if you intentionally promoted pro-seomoz posts to the home page, or were fooled. Thanks for clarifying.
I like the post and the tool!
But it is very refreshing to see someone being bitchy on SeoMoz. And in a way i agree with you John. Eppie isn't going to spend hours of his time writing this post just because he's nice. The end goal is to gain awareness and get more people linking to his site, thats basic white-hat seo. why do you think anyone guest posts on SeoMoz? Deal with it John.
Amazing results once again from Google. we have seen some amazing changes in the finance markets, mainly the property sector, come sites wither have next to no links or very very poor link distribution.
Cant wait to see how long this keeps going as its driving some of our clients crazy
Friend of mine send me to this post! Amazing research !I cant wait to use linkdetective
Cheers
SEOMoz is into outing sites now? I've been a member here since 2007 and never posted a comment. Had to break my silence for all of the people working in highly competitive areas that wouldn't appreciate seeing a major site like this get all granular on their strategies.
Oh, and "only 1 nav item!" - wow, nav items = quality. Got it, thanks Eppie!
Now? This is hardly a first.
Is it outing if the site's already been hit? What do you suppose I hoped would happen as a result? That Google would penalize it again? Move it from ranking 10,368th for its target phrases to 11,854th? The damage was done long before this post was authored.
That this was promoted to the main SEOMoz blog boggles the mind. If there's any trash that needs to be taken out, it's this lead generation post that completely outs someone I know publicly. If SEOMoz didn't get paid for this promotional post, they got ripped off. Enjoy building your list on the backs of outing others - and just hope that those who are in the know aren't so quick to out you and what you're doing.
Promotional post? The tool I built is offered free of charge, no strings attached. There's no lead generation here -- I don't run an SEO software company, and I don't have anything to sell to other SEOs. I'm not sure what you think I'm up to, but you're severely wrong.
As for "outing" others -- the site referenced in this post is already dead. It got hit sometime in January and appears to have had no traffic in February. See https://www.eppie.net/images/already-dead.png for proof. I wouldn't have posted this if the site was still viable.
Let's be honest here bud, there's no such thing as "no strings attached". I doubt you would have gone through the effort to develop this tool, spruce up a domain that was sitting around doing nothing as recently as two weeks ago, etc. simply for the explicit purpose of sharing something. If you're not generating leads, why collect email addresses? Why not just let people dump CSVs of their backlinks into your tool without having to go through an account verification? Anyone here worth their salt has been around long enough to be skeptical first and foremost. There have been no free handouts in the SEO SaaS world outside of YSE.
Actually there is. See this response.
I configured accounts within the tool so that you can save your reports and perform subsequent filtering on the data. If it was dump, evaluate, and dump back I wouldn't have been able to use that feature. Email addresses are needed for password reset and notification when a report gets completed since it takes some time to go out, fetch the pages, and analyze them. I don't think people would wait several minutes with nothing on screen while a report processed.
I do understand people being skeptical about how I could offer the service for free -- it's definitely not a normal approach. My hope was that the goodwill garnered in the community would, in the long run, justify the costs of development (my spare time) and hosting (a real expense).
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes good content is just good content. If it boosts his reputation, his inbound links, his social connections, that's time well-invested... But he did take a risk to do it. You don't have to like it, but projecting the worst possible intent isn't at all fair.
Hi Gravytrain, thanks for creating your account today, be sure to check out our blog etiquette. To suggest that we got paid for this post is simply ridiculous. It was submitted and approved as any YouMoz post is. I approved and I promoted it to the main blog because the community asked for it to be. This is how posts get promoted, the community essentially decides. I'm not taking the blame off of me, because I made the decision and I stand by it. It's a good post and a good tool and I'm glad we were able to publish it.
It's a good idea to have all the facts before deciding to bash not only the author of this post but an entire organization. Hopefully your future contributions will be a bit more professional and TAGFEE.
Oh don't worry Jennita, I can assure you there won't be any additional posts, which will be a win/win for both sides. I'm both surprised and disappointed that SEOMoz would post something like this, outing an active, currently indexed and fully functional website in a very competitive niche, regardless of whether or not they have been algorithmically or manually penalized. This takes "transparency" a little over the deep end. Think if this was one of your long-time paying members that you did this to - it's entirely unprofessional. I've been a reader here for many years, and finally felt compelled to register today to express my disgust. Having said that, I won't be back.
I still don't understand why this is unprofessional? This post didn't kill the site - it was already killed. If it was a long-time paying member, they'd already no this community's stance on link spam. Yeah, it works, but we're here to teach real businesses how to sustain themselves in the long term, and taking a past example of how one worked & failed (which, again, is in the past, regardless of this post) is a good way to show it.
It's simply "bad form" to highlight someone's work when such highlighting could cause unfair/unjust penalty.This is true of ranking sites as well as already de-indexed sites.
If a penalty is imposed due to publicity like this, the harm done TO A COLLEAGUE was not because the site did anything wrong, but because the publicity caused a problem for Google. The "outing" of SEO sites is db behavior. A penalized site can recover from a penalty. A publicly highlighted domain penalized to protect Google's PR is usually dead forever (except in extreme circumstances, like big national brands and 6 figure domains).
As for "the community's stance on link spam" the author of the article identifies several tools for link buying, and claims prior success using paid links (e.g. see his raving review of BuildMyRank paid link network). If the community cared like you suggest, the community manager should not have published this article.
I welcome anyone to identify where the magical line is between "white hat" and "black hat" SEO for Google. Until then, calling winners who successfully located that line "spammers" and highlighting their work even in a positive way is harmful to both them and seo. To highlight the work disrespectfully (as it was done here) is simpy douchbaggery.
I remind you that SEO vendors make money from all of this... including my contributions here. A community is only as wholesome as its participants and their behavior, despite policies, claims, or beliefs.
You, sir - clearly do not know how to read.