What do you do when you are being outranked by a spammer? It's one of the most frustrating things that an SEO can face, but before jumping to conclusions it's important to understand what exactly is happening.
In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives us helpful advice with many important steps to follow if you discover that a spammer is outranking you. Let us know your thoughts on this challenging problem in the comments below!
Video Transcription
Howdy SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a very tough problem, being outranked by spammers.
What I mean very specifically here is link spammers, because it is rare in the SEO world that today you are seeing other sorts of spam. Cloaking, manipulative redirection, doorway pages, they happen a little bit, but they are much less common. The most common forms of spam and the thing that I see people complain about all the time, the thing I get emails about, I get tweets about, we get Q&A about is, "Hey, Rand, I am being outranked by these spammers. Can you send this over to the Google webspam team? Can you tell the Bing webspam team? Who should I email over there? I filed my webspam reports. Do you think I should try and get it published on YOUmoz? Should I try and write to The New York Times and have them write about it because it seems like Google kicks people out when they're written about in The New York Times, at least for a little while?"
These are not always great tactics unfortunately, but I do want to walk you through some things that you should be doing when you think you are being outranked by spammers.
The first part is make sure, make 100% sure, that what you are looking at is really a ranking that's been earned through link spam. What I am talking about here is I will take you back. I will tell you a story of several years ago. This was probably, I am going to say 2007, and I was in the audience, I can't remember if I was on the panel or in the audience, and there was Google's head of webspam, has been for the last decade or so, Matt Cutts, on the panel. Matt was looking at some links using his special Google software where he is investigating a link graph right on his laptop, and someone from the audience had said, "Hey, Matt, I am getting outranked by this particular spammer." He looked and said, "No, you know, we see a few thousands links to that site, but we're actually only counting a few hundred of them, and they're the ones that are making it rank there."
So, think about that. We're talking about thousands of links pointing to a site. Think of all the links that might be pointing to a site here. Here are five different links that are pointing to this particular page. What the webspam team at Google is essentially saying is, "Hey, you know what? We know that this and this and this and this are spam. The reason that this page is ranking is because they do have some good links that we are counting." Remember it is often the case that Google's webspam team and their algorithm will not make these links cause a penalty against you, because then you could just point them at somebody else's site or page and make them drop in the rankings. Instead, what they'll do is drop the value of those, so that essentially it is like having a no-followed link for those pages. Yes, it's a followed link, but they are going to essentially say, "Oh, you know what? Our algorithm has detected that those are manipulative links. We are going to remove the value that they pass."
A lot of the times when you look through a list of hundreds or thousands of links and you see a lot of spam and you think to yourself, "Hey, that's why that guy is ranking. It's because he is spamming." It might not be the case. It could even be the case that person didn't actually build those spammy links. They just came through, you know, crap, junk on the Web. Not all the time, and usually you can tell the difference, but this is really something to keep in mind as you're analyzing that stuff. When you are, think to yourself, "Hey, how did they get the best-looking links that they've got, and could those be the ones that are responsible for making them rank so well?" Because if that's the case, you need to revisit your thesis around I'm being outranked by a spammer and think I am being outranked by a guy who's done some good link building who also happens to have lots of spammy links pointing at him. That's a completely different problem, and you need to solve for that.
If you are sure, so let's say you've gone through step one, confirmed that, you know what, this is a crap link too that Google shouldn't be passing value, but somehow they are. I want you to ask two more critical questions.
The first one: Is focusing on someone else's spam that's outranking you the best possible use of your web marketing time? You've got a lot on your plate. You don't just have to worry about SEO, right? These days you're worrying about SEO; you're worrying about keyword research; you're worrying about link building; you're worrying about content marketing; you're worrying about blogs and blog commenting and RSS and the traffic rating through there. You're worried about social media - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn - and the longtail of all these other sites - Quora and Pinterest, Reddit, StumbleUpon. You're worried about web analytics and analyzing your success and making sure things are going through. You have to worry about crawlers and XML site maps and robots.txt. Make sure that thinking about and spending time on trying to flag somebody else's spam or trying to get them penalized is absolutely the best possible thing that you can be doing with your day. If it's not, reprioritize and put something else up there.
The second question is, which we don't discuss at SEOmoz here because we really kind of hate this practice, but are you willing to and does your site have risk tolerance to go acquire spammy links? If you see someone's outranking you and you're like, well, I could get those kinds of links too or those exact links too, do you have the risk tolerance for it? If you believe that it is an ethical issue, do you have the moral flexibility for it? If you don't believe it is a moral question, do you have the budget for it? Is it the best use of your budget? Is it the best use of your time? I almost always believe the answer is no, with the possible exception of some super spammy fields, PPC (porn, pills, and casino), which I have never personally operated, and so I don't pretend to understand that world. But virtually every other form of legit business on the Web, I can't get behind this. But maybe you can. Maybe you want to. Decide if that's the route you want to take.
Once you answer those two, you can move on to step three, which is, should you report the spam? The problem here is, you are going to go and send it through, let's say, your Webmaster Tools report, and there are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of these filed every day. Probably put it somewhere between tens and hundreds of thousands of these filed every day, spam reports. Google says Webmaster Tools are the best place to file, when you are logged into your account, to report spam from other folks. Those reports go to a team of software engineers who work on Google's webspam and search quality teams. Then you can see, they've done a video, where they sit around and they prioritize all the day's projects and they determine who is going to work on what and how much energy they're going to put into it. You can probably tell that over the last couple of years, maybe even three years, there has not been a ton of energy spent to try and devalue link spam. In fact, a lot of paid links are working these days, and it's sort of a sad reality. I think that many people assume that Google's actually trying to move beyond linking signals, particularly social signals, Google+, by using the signals of users and usage data that they're getting through Chrome's market share, which I think was now reported globally as over 25% of all web browsers, which is very impressive, from StatCounter.
So, I would say that this is a low-value activity as well. Not that you necessarily shouldn't do it. I mean, if you want to try and help Google make the Web a better place and you believe in their sort of mission and the quality of the people there, then by all means, spend two minutes, report them for webspam. It's not going to take a ton of your time. But please, don't think this is a solution. This will not solve any of the problems you're trying to solve. It might help Google in the long run to get better, to try and analyze some forms of webspam and link spam that they might not have otherwise caught if you hadn't told them. Is it going to help you rank better? Boy, probably not, and even if it is, not for a long time, because these algorithmic developments take a tremendous amount of time and energy to implement. Panda was years in the making. Most of the link spam devaluations that happened in '07 and '08 were years in the making. You could see patents that were filed two years, four years before those things actually came out. But reporting spam is an option.
Then I want you to move on to step four, which is can you - I think you almost always can - outmaneuver the spammers using their own tactics? What I mean by this is you might see where those links are coming from, but what's winning? Is it coming from high PageRank or high MozRank pages? Sort of home pages of domains? Is it coming from internal pages? Are they coming from directories? Are they coming from forums? Are they coming from blogs? Are they coming from .edu sites? Where are those links coming from, what are they pointing to, and what kind of anchor text are they using? Is it diverse anchor text? Is it all exact match anchor text? You want to find, you want to identify all the patterns. You're going to say, "Oh, this is anchor text pattern and this is the diversity of those patterns of where those links are coming from and this is a type of site it is coming from and this is the quantity or the number of sites I'm seeing and here's where the link target's pointing to." You look at all those things and then you find ways to do it inbound. Find ways to do it white hat. I promise you, you can. Think of one of the most common forms of spam, which is someone hijacking .edu webpages on student domains and then they essentially have all these anchor text links pointing to a specific page on their site from .edu pages that are buried deep in a site, but because it is an .edu it is a trusted domain. Usually there are only 50 or 100 of them, but they seem to be passing juice.
So how do you get 20 or 30 good links from .edu? I'll give you some great examples. Well, I'll give you one, and then you can figure out tons more on your own and certainly there is tons of link building content that you can look at on the SEOmoz site. But here's a great one. Go do a search like your keyword - whoa, that's a lot of smudging - your keyword + file type:pdf or xls or something like that and site:.edu. What this is going to give you is essentially here is a bunch of research that has been done on .edu sites that's been published, that's probably kind of buried. Now, I want you to go create some great blog posts, some great content, that references this stuff, that turns it into a graphic, that makes a clever video about it, and then I want you to email whoever was responsible for the research, and I guarantee half the time they are going to link to you from that website, from the .edu website. They're going to be like, "Oh, this is great. Someone turned my research into an infographic on a commercial site. Very cool. Great to see that application in the real world. Thank you. Here's a link . . ." from an .edu that's not spammy, that's completely inbound, white hat because it's making the Web a better place. There are ways to figure out all of this stuff.
Then I want you take this last and final step, step five. Beat them by targeting the tactics, the channels, the people, and the keywords that they don't target. Remember what spam does. Spam tends to look at, if here is the keyword demand curve and we've got the head in here with all the popular keywords, that's where all the spam is. You very rarely, extremely rarely, see spam down in the tail. So if you can do things like user generated content, building a community, building tons of longtail great content, having a blog, having a forum, a place where real people participate and are creating a kind of Q&A site, you're going to target all that longtail. Remember 70% of the keyword volume is in here. This is only 30% up in the fat head and the chunky middle. Great. Fantastic way to work around them. Or think about ways that they can't target, the channels that spammers, especially link spammers never target - social media, forums, and communities. Rarely do they ever target blogs. Those people don't take those sites seriously. They don't take them authentically. Think about the branding elements you can build. You can have a better site design, a higher conversion rate, a way better funnel. People subscribe to your email. To follow you, subscribe to your RSS feed. No spammer is ever going to get that, and those are customers that you can keep capturing again and again and again, because when you do inbound marketing, when you do white hat marketing, you don't have to just push your site up the rankings. You can approach it from a holistic point of view and win in all sorts of tactics and all sorts of channels. That's what I love about this field too.
All right everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you'll feel maybe a little bit less stressed out about that nasty spammer who is ranking above you. I hope you'll see us again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Before you do any of the things Rand suggests, I suggest you take a realistic look at your own on-page optimization. Most of the people I hear complain about being outranked by spammers are nowhere near ready to begin looking at link competition.
I agree with you Scott. Maybe not most of the times from my experience but it's a common complain. My recommendation is to ensure that you have a good content and on-page optimization before you start linkbuilding, it'll be easier.
Very Nice Point Scott! Most of the time when people out rank they blame their off-page optimization (particularly link building). I believe whenever you see pages are not ranking better or the competitor who you think is spammer, out ranked you due to many junk links may be from forums and all, it’s always a great advice to reconsider your on-page optimization and most of the time you will find our the very basic mistake that you did!
This WBF is a little bit frustrating, because all, who are concerned with that issue, would like to hear something like that: Yes, report a spam and Google will punish them within a certain time period and boom bang - they are back in the hemisphere of the pages 100+.
And even if I target the long tail where no link farm efforts are found - they do occupy many of the main keywords we would like to rank, too.
Well - but as you said: be positive, focus on different marketing goals or on the long tail, try to find out their patterns and be happy.
Petra, I agree with you that this is frustrating. I have a 2000+ words article and some backlinks to it outranked by an article with about 80 words and 1 backlink, which is on a Blogspot blog.
My PA is 33 and the other page has 49.
Is this fare?
I agree that it is upsetting to hear, but I'd rather Rand be honest and say "sorry guys, it just doesn't work" than to simply carry on and believe that it does.
If it is the case, then it's up to us to now think "ok, so now what?" And for those who do spend a lot of time reporting spammers, they might consider spending their time more wisely and productively if they now know their efforts are likely to be fruitless...
Something I always think is that Google are shooting themselves in the foot for the future by their inaction, and I'm not even sure if they realise it.
The thing is, I understand of course that they don't want to have to do things manually and want the algo and filters, etc... to be able to do it all on its own, but it may never get there, if it does it could be ages, and if it does then new ways will be found to game it. Now, in the mean-time, and therefore forever... honest, quality sites are reporting spam that ranks above them and shouldn't. So what happens, nothing... six months go by and it's still the same. By this point the spammer feels he's beaten the system and the guy with the good site has had enough and is saying "okay, let's break the rules too then!"
In the imaginary, off-the-top-of-my-head-right-now movie "Google Wars", Darth Vader wins and Luke crosses over to the darkside. Why? Because the Yoda is ignoring Luke and isn't bothered about Vader... he's not sorting it all out because he's working on some software that might fix things by itself one day.
Petra - i don't think Rand was suggesting you should optimise for the long tail search. Rather he was suggesting you look at UGC opportinities that would attract long tail search.
d
I have to say I was scared to watch this but it ended up being pretty good. That said couple of notes
1) I think you should add a question to that 2 question set you had up there... that would be "regardless of linkspam.. do they have a better site than me? If so how can I fix that?"
2) I was actually kinda laughing during the outmaneuver bit because when my greyhat is on my head.. this is exactly the process I go through to beat a whitehat space. I match the percentages the top results are getting but in larger numbers. Kinda cool to hear it from the other side :-)
Great job Rand!
Thanks Kris - I definitely agree with asking the question of whether you've got that "better site." Anyone doing white hat should be able to leapfrog 90% of pure spam sites and most gray/black hat stuff (since it's built for the short term knowing that it might only last a short time). Building a great brand is actually a really good strategy here - it usually helps CTR and CRO.
Kris - can I ask you, what's your sense of Google's linkspam fighting ability and agressiveness? My sense is they've been soft on it the last couple years, and a lot of low quality stuff is working (though they've been effective against a lot of malware and the more dangerous/illegal stuff).
I think google could definitely be doing more than they are doing. And I don't think its just an algorithmically difficult problem thats holding them back either. There are a lot of ways to isolate some of the real low hanging fruit that still works but shouldn't. That said I think a lot of pure whitehats probably underestimate some of the technical expertise that goes into smart grey and black hat these days.
We very much dabble in social signals for example. If Im going to do a big link push for a site that hasn't previously seen a lot of links in a while and I dont want to bother with ramping up for consistency I might just go out and create "viral" indicators. Basically fake social buzz.
Right before a big link bomb I might drum up a press release, then go out and write some "blog responses" to the news. Then I might tap into a network of friends and get them all tweeting about it. Then go out and automate or buy some likes and digg/reddit/+1 type stuff. I might even pop onto fivverr and buy a couple youtube video responses to the "news". Now I've got social signals that make the sudden influx of links look like just part of a blitz of PR.
I can do all of this for much cheaper than creating actual buzz thanks to globalization and scale.
This is just a simple example obviously there are a lot of other things that people play with. Things that I feel WOULD make it a lot harder for google to isolate. That said... there is a lot of really unsophisticated crap that still works and shouldn't like I mentioned above.
I've joked but kinda also mean it seriously.. if matt ever wanted to let me work from home and pay me well I'd totally be down for working the otherside of this game but I just don't see them likely to attack the problem by hiring guys like me... which is sad.
I'd certainly put in a good word for you :-)
And yeah - I know there's a lot of sophistication in what some black/gray hat folks do, but to your point, my sense is that loads of the easy-to-catch stuff is working far better than it should. Fingers crossed, Google has something Panda-scale or larger in the works on the link spam front after the holidays.
It must be extremely difficult for Google to roll out wholesale algorithmic changes to the link graph. The unintended consequences could have a real impact on our fragile economy. For example, if Google would have also equally demoted links from all the sites hit by Panda at the same time they demoted the content farms the ripple effects would have been potentially devastating. I know this is why it takes them so long to roll out updates.
@ Kris
If he will hire you than he need to search for the new job in monster.com ... lolzzz
But I do not understand one thing ... to check whether a website is from a spammer or not why you go for the link tactics ... simply scrutiny the content of their website and you will get your answer ...
Spammer do not build GOOD websites ... they build links.
@Lalit
Saying that every spam site is not a GOOD website is like saying there aren't smart criminals. Smart criminals just don't get caught.
Pardon a butt-in on this one, but the more I learn about Google as a culture the more I wonder if the lack of attention to specific spam cases is tied up in the coder's mindset. Evaluating and penalizing individual cases is not only hard to scale (and people-intensive), but it's inelegant. Hard-core algo coders lust after the simplest, most elegant solution, and every flag and exception they add is a stain on perfection.
I think you made a great point - part of what they're doing is probably hoping that next-gen, non-link signals can fight link spam better, and so fighitng link spam case by case just isn't sexy anymore. Unfortunately, I think that's a bit naive (on their part) - people will find ways to spam social, etc. Granted, the mix will be stronger, but they still need to solve some core problems endemic to the foundation of a link-graph based algo.
Hi Rand,
interesting WBF this one.
I'd like to underline what you said fast in point one: that Google is not penalizing by default a site if it owns spam links pointing to itself. I believe this can reassure people worried about not fair competitive link building. In fact that is another classic question in Q&A: "What if another site does start creating spammy links pointing to my site?". Obviously, there are cases when that tactic can have success, but - honestly - I've seen very very few cases and it was because of a huge spam links generation overcoming the few good links the attacked sites had (and maybe, in cases of niche, they were literally few ones).
I agree with you when you say that people should start to diversify the traffic sources of their site doing inbound. And that is surely a key strategy in general, because even if you are a shining white hat SEO, it may come a new "Panda" update and screw you. This is especially important for all of us living in a Google dominated search market (Europe).
Finally, as you commented in reply to Kris (a great guy that could teach tons of stuff to some candid white hats... yes, Kris, I'm inviting you to post a YouMoz here), I too sincerely believe that Google is cooking something for the next weeks/months; something that it is related to the combinations of all the new signals/factors it is actually pushing, which maybe won't eradicate the link spam problem, but could make it too much time consuming to be profitable still.
Hey gfiorelli1, I was the guy at MozCon who had 3 million links pointed to my site by Martin McDonald. It was to my www.shipoverseas.com site. I checked GWT and there were TONS of new links. I did not see any increase in rankings and just as important, I didn't see a penalty in rankings either. These links were coming from gambling types of websites.
After Martin removed the anchor text in the footer, I continued to link build for the same keyword and now I'm #1. I achieved #1 by doing manual link building, yes it still works. 3 million links from Martin's PUSH SEO didn't work so well.
LOL... I remember that moment (and it was just a whisper that Martin did not used my mozcation.com site).
By the way, what are you saying seems confirming what Rand is saying in this WBF, about Google discounting spam massively generated links.
Yeah, I felt like writing a Youmoz post about it, but I deleted the snapshots in GWT. Also I don't want to sound like I am putting Martin McDonald on blast. But you are right, it comfirms what Rand said.
I am a great fan of competitive analysis and i do focus on someone else's spam that's outranking me. There is hardly any ecommerce website out there which hasn't got at least bunch of spammy links. Links through do follow blog comments, do follow forum signature, do follow low quality directories, unmoderated UGC sections of edu sites.... Well they all work. Welcome to Link buidling of 2003 in 2011.
When i see these links picked up by google and labeled with high PA/DA by OSE i get the temptation to acquire them. Oh they are so easy to acquire, aren't they? And when they are helping my competitors then i dont see any reason why they wont help me. So depending upon your risk tolerance and niche you can go ahead and get these links. But there is a big risk of Google devaluing such links with some algo update. And when this will happen your site ranking may just tank. Then how you are going to explain this big drop to your client. Just yesterday i detected a do follow spammy comment on an authoritative website which links out to my competitor. The comment was something like this: 'thank you for sharing this information...www.ilaughatyoulinkbuilding.com'. I can also do the same thing and get the link pretty fast. But then i doubt the link juice a comment link will pass. Anways I also want the link from the same site. I just can't let it go. Then I explored other ways to get link from that site.
I didn't have to look hard. Just above the article there was a link to 'submit contents'. I submitted an article there and got the link from the same website in a legitimate way and this is the link which is not a comment link. This is the link which i can report to my client without feeling embarrassed. Your competiors' do link spam on some websites because they weren't able to get links from those websites in a legitimate way. If you can find a way to get the same links but in a legitimate way then by all means focus on their spam.
I had to deal with this recently and the spammer not only had a ton of paid links, but they had THOUSANDS of +1s on their homepage that there was no way they were real.
Search "Digital Marketing Agency" and you'll see one in the top few results with 4,460 +1s. Go to their site and it's nearly impossible to find the +1 button. Keep in mind Techcrunch doesn't even have that many +1s, and they're a content site and not a boutique agency...yeah, no way those are legit.
I didn't report em as those rankings won't last with how obvious they're spamming, but it'd be funny to say to Google "Hey Google, someone is spamming Google using Google +1s. Can you look into that?"
You forgot to add flawless step 6: include "*DO NOT CLICK ON THE ABOVE SEARCH RESULT, IT'S SPAM!!!1*" on your META Description ;)
Nice WF, keep'em coming!
This is an excellent Whiteboard Friday. I really enjoyed the example of getting links from .edu keyword+filetype:pdf site:edu This is Brilliant!! However, I feel like Rand could have rolled off another 30 examples in about 5 minutes. Could SEOmoz put a post together listing a bunch of these?
I agree! I would love to get a list of more examples like the .EDU example Rand gave. The more examples the better.
The thing that seperates SEOmoz from the other SEO communities is the actionable posts and videos like this! Every Friday I learn something new.
Great Work!
We did a Whiteboard+ video about link building recently with some similar tips https://plus.google.com/u/1/112544075040456048636/posts/Xhk76XrptGd
The Value of Today's Whiteboard Friday & The Whiteboard+ Link is 40X the price of SEOmoz Pro. Really Really incredible. I do feel though that the Whiteboard+ is a little hidden and needs to be promoted more on the SEOmoz website. Not everyone is sold on Google+ and I personally think if Google doesn't quadruple their marketing around it then it'll just die like Buzz.
Now, because I'm lazy (well I'm SEO lazy, which means I only work twice as hard and twice as fast as the rest of the human population) I'd still like to see a list of recommended site: examples. Or at least more of these on the blog.
A great video. The fact is that I think everybody would like to be doing "white hat", the problem is that it's
A) Typically more expensive to execute because it requires the creation of resources, etc.B) Tougher to get the buy-in and time from the client. IE: A lawyer client has absolutely no interest in what he sees as a waste of time putting together some sort of blog.C) Has its own types of risks. It's easy to tell a client "you'll get 50,000 blog comment links" (I'm not advocating this) but tougher to say "We want to make this infographic. We've researched your mark it. We think it's going to stick but we're not sure of the reach and we can't guarantee success."
That is NOT to say it's impossible, it just takes more work, more heavy lifting and more creativity. The fact of the matter is that yes, it IS incredibly frustrating to be beaten out by spammers, so the tendency is to want to just join in the fray.There's a great post out today by Aaron Wall about the decline of the organic link as well - definitely recommend others take a look at it.
I think it's obvious Google is trying to make a push away from relying on organic links as much as they do. The question is just how well they are able to execute that in a medium where there's already so much running amok.
SPAM = Sites Positioned Above Me
I thought it stood for Search Positions Are Manipulated.
Great WBF. I especially like your advice regarding analyzing if being concerned with spammy competition is the best use of your time. Also, I know Google is trying to resolve the spam problem, but it can be so frustratinig to explain to clients why we don't do spammy things (being very whitehat) because they don't work in the long run. A lot of times they only care that other people are outranking them, regardless of the reason.
Thanks!
I've always noticed that those that participate in link spamming, eventually disapperar from the rankings. It might take a few months... but is not a long term strategy.
Unlikely sites consisting of pure low quality spam links will out rank sites with a good link portfolio and on page optimisation, the best white hat SEO I have seen, was actually in house, done by the client themself, rightly so, exchanging links with related businesses after talking to them on the phone.
Obviously as an SEO, who is not going to have as much knowledge about a clients website as they are, this is a harder tactic to use as approaching from a different perspective, unless pretend to be the client.
Google, Bing, etc will get the algorithm better in time, however until then, the flaws in the algorithm will always be exploited by certain SEO's.
My advice to counterbalance this is to submit to some of the more expensive web directories, ensure Google Places fully optimised (Have clients picking up national search terms, in their local area, through places), use a PPC Ad campaign alongside SEO and ensure some pages of clients site have a good amount of content to pick up long tail keywords.
In short, take more time looking at what you can do better to your clients sites, than worrying about the methods used by your competitors.
Great WBF Rand :) I've had this problem before - if it's blackhat it always has a limited shelf life & you just need to get on with whiter techniques - Google will bust it eventually
As an interim solution to help boost morale: click the link to the spammy site in the SERPs, bounce back and click the "Block all www.spammyspamspam.com results" (although it only works when logged in or pws!=0)
Seems like brand links no matter where they come from are the hardest to detect as spam, google loves big brands and linking using your brand or site name must be hard to detect . I wonder if all comments and bookmarking sites end up in the " let's ignore these Google box" as they seem to be the ones that are easily spammed
I am a great fan of WBF. Am waiting for every edition of WBF. When i see Rand on screen, its perfect and the way Rand explains is something that provide great value to the topic. This week is also awsome about link spammers, even i thought of complaining many guys who are doing better than me on serp but i realised after a certain period of time that they have the backup of strong links along with some spammers peeping through.You confirmed that perfectly with this WBF.Waiting for next edition..Be there Rand!!
Hi everyone, a new pro member here comenting for the first time.
My thoughts...I can learn from spammers and maybe I will get shot down in flames here but here goes...My only goal is to rank my websites (I don't do any any other SEO apart from my own) as high as I can and I will pretty much do anything that works.
I remember reading another post here about article marketing and how it sucks, etc yet I'm sorry to say, it still works and if I didn't do it then I would lose out to those that do.
I don't regurgitate content, I don't 'spin' articles and I don't do anything that I would consider to be BH but until Google starts penalising forum spamming, over zealous blog commenting and article marketing, I will continue to do it.
I spend a lot of time creating fresh and original content for my sites but I'm not averse to a few 'easy' links from time to time.
Yeah I would buy a certain amount of that.
Typically you can increase your rankings with these methods, but they are not usually blessed with longevity (and often get knocked over if a powerful high PR blog network rocks up). In largely non competitive, local search markets you can fly with this but not with highly competitive broad SERPS.
Good point though, I'm with you and I don't beleive it is totally dead & burried!
Thanks.
I wish it was dead and buried but the site knocking me off the number 1 spot in G is a site that has approx.130 dofollow links on the spammiest blogs you could ever wish to see.
I know Matt Cutts said that it could be that G discards relevance to those links and only uses that site's 'good' links but still, it does rankle with me because we have a lot more 'good' links built through quality and natural linkbuilding.
For the record, it is in financial services and I was number 1 until last August when this site appeared and knocked us off so I am hoping that their longevity is ending at some point!
Really helpful WBF Rand. Good to have the warning to be sure that the site is actually spammy, it can be all to easy to assume the site that ranks above you is doing so unjustly and we have to check the facts first. :-) Have a good weekend!
Great WBF Rand;) Thanks.
Great advice Rand!
As simplistic as what it was, most people invest the vast majority of their time analysing and worrying about who is above them in the SERPS and why.
It would be great if you could do a part 2 to this video, giving deeper advice on building natural, high PR backlinks.
Once again, awesome video :-)
Hi Rand, I loved your spontaneous list of what we all spend time on around the 4:40 mark.
I have seen some interesting effects to sites I've sent spam reports in on. I'm not sure if my reports helped or if their tactics had less of an effect over time, but I've noticed this year that many sites that were doing well have taken a hit in the past 3-5 months.
But in the end, I do agree that moving forward is best and we shouldn't worry about spammers and should focus on a solid web marketing strategy based on the long-term.
Interesting post. I agree with most of what you say, just disagree on the statement that they do not traget blogs because they are not taken seriously. Any decent competent blog with a lot of traffic will receive more that its share of spam...
It will be very difficult to compete with someone that spams and isnt lazy (like most of them are).
If they are spamming links and using quality hand spun content it will be very difficult.
I have done alot of blackhat (in the past before working commercially) and still have sites that rank #1/#2 using those links.
Thank you Rand for an interesting White Board Friday. Great ideas to combat spammers.
Thanks, Rand! Great WBF!
Thanks Mr.Fishkin.
everytime I look at your WBF I really feel better about the future of SEO or generally Search Engines but when after a few days I take a look at real resaults my feeling goes away and real world come in front of my eyes. real spammers and etc.
Sometime i think maybe you are talking about special search engines that are made for you specially Google.
Maybe I'm Wrong
What would you call a small 'local' business like a mechanic who outranks three major player NATIONAL brands for the main keyword and they are doing it with thousands of links from different blogs which are all barely distinguishable as english, in fact many of which are just plain gibberish posts full of random english sentences stuck together with an anchor text link at the bottom. Most of the posts have absolutely no relevance to the anchor text at all. the fact that they are killing us in the organic results is so frustrating when we are busting our asses to move even one spot and pouring hours and money into content, video, social, adevrtising etc. And as for relevance in the search results - if I am searching for a mechanic i would like to see either a national franchise or a small guy operating near me - not some small business on the other side of the country from me ! darrrgh !!
Hey Guys,
I'm an active SEO and believe strongly in the white hat practices because every successful brand, never needed to buy links. It's almost like trying to buy love from your spouse! If you have to buy links, essentially your saying that you cannot be passionate, knowledgeable or intelligent enough to produce a service or product that naturally takes off in the market!
When I see crap like this from the following domain www.acaiberry-australia.com.au, it annoys me greatly! A friend showed and I had trouble explaining it as "Google Quality Guidelines" should really stamp it out.
They have literally submitted thousands of the same article across their article network, with the same spammy duplicate content and anchor text as the backlink. Please visit bit.ly/t7B8yW
I have no idea who to be mad at, this spammer or the fact that Google cannot pick it up in their spam detection software. I mean, the content and the backlinks are the same for over 11,700 articles. Now come on!
If the above link doesn't work, just copy and paste this and let me know what yous think!
bit.ly/t7B8yW
This is a good video but honestly, spammer don't care if you "outsmart" them.
Automated spam takes seconds to click and run. Whitehatters can work hard, spend hours of your time on beating blackhat spam.
If they do get caught, all they need to do is rinse and repeat on another aged domain.
This is a fantastic WBF! Just because spammy sites can gain momentum on certain phrases, it is the methods they use that inhernetly restrict them from addressing the 70% of phrases that will route traffic.
What really sucks is when the links are from an extremely obvious link selling scheme like these guys:
https://www.homesdiscovered.com/
ok, so they dont look like link sellers, just an honest real estate portal right?
wrong:
https://realestate-portland.com/links/submit.php
https://realestate-scottsdale.com/links/submit.php
https://tampabayrealestatehomes.com/links/submit.php
https://sacrealestatehomes.com/links/links17.php
these websites share the same registration and nameserver information as homesdiscovered, each page links back to a broken 'links' page on their site. and they let you be a "resource" for only $95 a year.But i agree with Rands take, if you cant join them, dont beat your head on the wall. Beat them by seeing the underlying reasons the tactic works for the rankings. These link farms dont last long and (hopefully) get beat down in value sooner or later.
Great post - but I'm intrigued by the statement that "it's a sad reality" that "a lot of paid links are working". Has there been a way to measure the success of paid links over time ? With the long succession of Panda releases and Google's renewed focus on this, I would think that the "value" of paid links has got to be in some kind of steady decline. I would like to believe that that is true -- but is it ? Is there anyway to see whether there has been a pattern of decline in the value of paid links ?
Great point from Rand that links come from people; Target people, build relationships and the byproduct will be good links. A spammer always has to have some subterfuge, so is never in a postion to build a relationship which can be valuable in many others ways not just for the link, but for traffic and joint initaitives too.
Stop snitching...lol, glad it wasn't recommended
https://seosnitchlist.tumblr.com/
Great WBF. In my opinion if you want to fight spammer you may invest in good content: with that people will link to you and because they are real people they may link to you from their blog, twitter account, facebook page, etc...and because they link to you from that channels, google will trust on these links because they come from real people!
May be those people (as per Rand SPAMMERS) who outranked you, know the basic of SEO very well and applying it with a full proof planning.
I almost missed last week's WBF, glad I finally saw it. Great tactic for gathering .edu backlinks. I can't tell you how valuable these weekly videos have been - thank you Rand!
I've been waiting on this video for a long time. I apprecate that you didn't shy away from the fact that some of the spammy techniques (ie. link buying) are effective yet risky. I think your last point reigns true. The SEO industry is not so much about "rankings" anymore. Online marketers need to start looking at the bigger picture which is inbound marketing.
Loved this WBF, it's a very difficult problem to overcome. Forum spam in particular is very difficult to outrank, especially when the forum itself is well-respected and directly related to the niche in question. It's not something we want to do so it's extremely tough when we focus on the time and effort of quality links and quality on-page SEO just to be outranked by forum posts.
Maybe it is a silly question, but have you tried to engage in those same forums with quality interventions and with links back to your site and content (maybe blog posts, if you have a blog)?
That could be a good example of inbound as explained by Rand in this WBF.
It's quite difficult to do because the forum is full of companies and spammers promoting their own services, and customers complaining about their hosts. Many posts and replies are simply automated spam which is left unmoderated. That combined with the scale we'd need to work at to see any results is tough, plus it would be incredibly difficult to look objective. The other companies are all very small, often only one person or a handful of people involved altogether from what I can see. We just operate on a completely different scale and with different views.
I guess what I'm saying is that we'd rather continue to put our resources and value into creating useful tools, posts etc. for our customers rather than adding value to a spam-filled forum with no benefits for us beyond SEO. I have no idea why the site is highly regarded at all by Google to be honest. It might be because there are better quality posts in the other areas the forum covers, I don't know.
We have a very broad link profile because of the nature of the business, and obviously web hosts don't link to each other so our best links frequently come from our customers, which includes pretty much any niche you can think of, but very rarely web hosting ;) I think relevance is a huge factor in this.
Great video Rand and one which is causing us a few problems for our clients.
Few comments;
1. Google spam tool & counting links - how effective do you think that G is at this? I've seen a few examples of this where sites only have links under PA 30 but thousands of them and only a handful of links above that OUTRANK our clients sites who have links which quality wise are much better. This isn't a one off but across several industries
2. I agree you need to weigh up the tolerance (good word) to getting shady links to your site but in effect you are saying that in order to beat them you need to join them. i don't agree with this because eventually (surely) Google will catch up with the link spammers and penalise them. I don't think it's a good road to go down.
3. I love the .edu idea - genius.
Having seen more and more rankings this year I know that G still has along way to go to sort this and that blackhat tactics still work so your point #5 is really important. Using channels which have an effect which spammers don't/can't use is really the only way to win until Google manages to crack the link spammers.
People seems to focus too much on external links and never work on internal links. I have achieved great results by just improving my internal linking.
I totally agree with Rand and the workouts he has mentioned. There are lots of ways to get quality backlinks. Have you ever tried a PODcast, a screensaver, document/image sharing sites? These are all valid ways to getting backlinks from high authority sites. You just need to be creative !
Yea, this is a actual problem sometimes, so thank You Rand for sharing with as in solving this!
Great WBF. I have to completely agree with most points. Yes it's important to see what the spammers and competitors are doing and copy. But not go after the same links, but to see where the links are coming from and try and rank in similar channels too.
So going back to the start? What if I throw 10,000 links at a web page and the links are all the worst quality? Are you saying that Google will simply disregard these links now? What about penalties for this sort of thing?
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but you gave the impression at the start that these types of links will be simple disregarded.
Hey everyone!
So first of all, thanks Rand, for another great WBF!
Secondary: I believe if I really want to "help the web to be a better place", then I would focus my time on gathering and sharing more valuable information for my customers and not playing the game of theirs.
Just for an example(from sports :D): I am a huge fan of basketball. Although my hometown team has very valuable players, they sometimes lose games... just because they tend to enter into other team's game/rhytm.
Now are you really sure, you want to do that? :)
I thought it was a great whiteboard Friday. There is no point in Rand saying "yes a report to Google will kick the spammers out" when, frankly it doesn't or certainly it not guaranteed. I think its also good to see/hear/read someone as respected as Rand remind people that just because a site has spammy links does not mean that the webmaster / marketing teams are building spammy links. Sites can accumulate them over time from age.
As someone who is always trying to explain the importance and opportunities of .edu links to companies, I found that particular mention by Rand extremely useful as it is a great/clear example of how interesting and viral content can be created to build strong links from pretty much any industry.
Spam happens in some niches where most sites in that niche are involved in some type of non-ethical SEO such as Poker and Life Insurance, so it is hard to compete from my experience.
Another thing I have seen people do in the past is build spammy links to competitors (on purpose), which can be a real nightmare to remove after black hats have moved in.
But yeah in the end of the day if your on site and off site is not on par with the spammer then you need to re evaluate the sitation.
I think this is the perfect post for me to share a little something I picked up yesterday. I own an SEO company in South Africa and we only focus on google.co.za rankings.
We have a variation of the .org namespace called .org.za which is meant to be for non profit organisations :) yeah right....
Anyway, I noticed yesterday that 2 VERY VERY competative industries are being dominated by org.za. domain names.
check this out: without mentioning the actual sites go to google.co.za and search for:
"life insurance""car rental"
please tell me for the life of me WHY those 2 domains are ranking so highly if google claims to be blocking spammy links and fishing out crappy sites?
Is it .org.za could it be that powerful? or is it the 4000 links coming into the site which has 6 pages indexed?
Great WBF session, WHITE HAT rules and always will. Google will always find ways to bust black hats so they may overtake for a brief moment but not for long if you keep on track "white hatti'n"
Love and hard work is the key to sucsess!
Completely agree, it's not a solution to focus trying to make Google aware of what your competition is doing. Instead it's better to keep being the best at what you're doing and eventually you'll outrank the competition that aren't doing a good job. I think it's quite interesting that Google aren't investing too heavily in the link spam side of things because that must be an indication about the direction they see the algo going in the future.
Also I think we can get a bit bogged down in trying to find patterns in what the competition are doing and do something to outmaneuver them rather than concentrating on doing everything really well - by that I mean having a really good and varied marketing mix pointing links back at the site.
thanks Rand for sharing this. It's useful to know how to act in this case, since in google.it I'm seeing a lot of spamming results in second / third position on the SERPs. I really hope Google is gonna implent more results for google.it, because for e-commerce-related queries (especially when you are searching for brands) there is a lot of mess.
Hi guys,
I used to use some less than White hat tools a few years ago and I can through experience say that although some of the lower hanging stuff, the stuff that Google isn't catching is still working it takes ALOT more of it to produce any kind of positive feedback for a site.
I used to sit there and use all the tools - xRumer, Scrapebox, Ubot, AMR, AMD etc and just churn out comments pumped with links to forums, blogs etc... then re-check them with scrapebox (Lovely tool, great for WH) and check which posts, forums etc were auto-approve and then re-hit them again and again and again... very tedious!
Some of the top GH/BH guys can come up with some fantastic theories (not that I now condone), on how to get spam to pull weight but it takes alot of work, not worth the time!
As Rand said, the low level stuff is still pulling rank, but imho just barely.
Great WBF, Rand. It's so easy and tempting to get to a stage and think "sod it, if you can't beat 'em..." but I like how you suggest a way to beat them and approach it in a white-hat way. Good job.
It's a shame that that's the case about the web spam process, what with there being that many requests (probably lots of junk/spammy requests, ironically) and that Google's focus has possibly changed...
One of my client's competitors is #1 for an industry head term and according to my anti-virus software, the site contains "potentially dangerous content" and has therefore been blocked on my machine. If this is the case then surely this is a worthy and just reason to report a site (spam in the truest sense, perhaps)? Does anyone know if there's a different process and/or way of reporting when it comes to something more serious, such as this? I'd be curious to know, as surely removing them from Google would genuinely benefit searchers if there is a potential danger involved...
Surprised to hear from Rand that Google isn't spending much time trying to devalue spammy links. I do agree that it makes sense for them to move beyond such a heavy weight on linking signals and move on to social signals which are a bit harder to game. Still surprising to hear that spammy and paid links are still working pretty well in 2011.
Another great whiteboard Friday!
Rand, the post starts a bit horribly but there are multiple points where I have agree you like:
Report Google, yeah that’s right! Its recommended by Google and there is no harm with that but do understand the Google process… Request you sent on Google will be handled manually and there is no time scale where your report will come in consideration so yeah it’s good to report if you are conformed but not think your job is done after this!
The other point which is painful but if you are wearing the white hat so this is best to out rank them using some good quality tactics!
Thanks for the Awesome Friday!
Amen to (1) and (2) - it's so easy to take the competition's tactics personally, and you can end up making them into a white whale that you never catch. I've seen people virtually let their business implode because they were so obsessed with the competition in a completely impotent way.
Great Video.
I liked the dialogue between Kris Roadruck and Rand.
The main point I get from this is be sure you know what is happening and why. Don't assume. Link spamming certainly is certainnly frustraing to allof us who don't do it.
So I guess a good takeaway from this is also -- Don't be too reliant on rankings, especially "vanity" term rankings even though the keyword volume is high, as these are the keywords most likely to be targeted by spammers? Also surely an uplift in overall traffic via a variety of other mid- long tail keywords beats chasing the spammer who suddenly (annoyingly) started ranking at above you?
Yes! Rand your tip on using research from edu sites and creating it into an infographic does work. We had a similar situation where we used stats and facts from multiple trusted sites and each fact on the infographic was a link to the source from which it was derived.
We promoted the graphic to multiple edu and gov sites and the direct links to the information helped confirm the infographic as credible and made it easier to get linkbacks.
Thanks for the advice! I'm brainstorming now other ways to outsmart these spammers with white hat techniques!
Another reminder that SEO is much like the rest of life in that one should not worry about what others are doing, but on those things you can control.
This is a great argument outlining why it holds true to SEO.
Great stuff Rand......really like the thinking out of the box with doing a search for pdf info on edu sites.....;~)
Rand, I love the topic and think it's awesome to shed light on this subject but I can give 10 examples of highly competitive keywords and the sites that rank in the top 3 with either little to no link graph history and sites that are newly made, keyword spam domains.
Google is trying to catch the spam with a net that has too many holes to let the sneaky guys wiggle out from. The big fish who are legitimate are getting caught in this net. Most users don't know the difference from spam or legitiamte sites and the spam sites are reaping the user engagement metrics because of it. With the top 3 serp position CTR at an all time low, being knocked from #3 to #4 is a tremendous hit. Our site has improved drastically in Yahoo and Bing although they obviously don't send the traffic that Google does, it is a signal that we are on the right track wiht our SEO efforts. Google has yet to properly get their s**t toghether and it's becoming detrimental to users and content creators overall.
Again, I love where you're coming from but would love to hear your take more on both sides as in entertaining the fact that Google may not be "with it" at the moment.
awesome wbf. very relevant to modern issues faced by seos
Good call - I think a lot of the issues raised here are relevant and, as Scott said - you should look at the quality score of your own pages before you start worrying about what some SEO spammer is doing...
I guess its simply about doing what you do - build quality links, write good quality, keyword rich content, keep optimising your pages and keep the love flowing. Simple? Nah - but that doesn't mean it's not fun!
Thanks Rand. But what about is somebody copies my content, what to do in this case?