16 replies to this topic

[lister]

I have done some competitor analysis and it appears that my competitor, who ranks far higher than we do, has hundreds and hundreds of paid directory listings that are all relevant and seem to be not that spammy....

So, my question is, is it such a bad thing? I mean, these are links that are $5 a time but they seem to make their website rank extremely well....ok I am sure that they are doing plenty of other things but still, the paid directory links seem to work for them.

Am I missing something here? I though that google frowned upon such 'easy' activity?

Thanks!

[qwerty]

I can't tell you that it's helping them, but then again, I can't tell you it isn't. It's likely that some of those listings are helping and other aren't. At the very worst, getting those listings was a waste of time and money.

[lister]

I can't tell you that it's helping them, but then again, I can't tell you it isn't. It's likely that some of those listings are helping and other aren't. At the very worst, getting those listings was a waste of time and money.

Yeah, I think i know what your saying.....it just seems that they have simply spent $2000 and just carpet bombed every directory under the sun. Thing is though, they have now ranked always at page one for almost a year.....

All Im saying is that it seems to work

[Randy]

And it will work up to a point lister. But there's always that caveat.

Let's say their competitors keep on building better quality links in an effort to displace them in the rankings, and this site keeps on directory/blog/forum/whatever spamming to keep their ranking edge. At a certain point they'll reach a point where their crap backlinks will far outnumber those decent quality links they have pointing at their site. When that happens their site suddenly loses some of the trust placed in it by the search engines, even if they don't involve themselves in any other questionable tactics. Plus they'll be competing against stiffer competition who have done things the right way.

This little example is one way you see sites rank really well for a year or two, then suddenly drop off a cliff. It takes awhile to be discovered because it takes awhile to reach critical mass, but once the line in the sand is crossed and the drop happens it takes them just about as long to recover. And the only way to recover is to stop with the crappy link building tactics and put in the time and effort to find really good quality links.

[lister]

That is an excellent answer! Very clear....

Patience again seems to be the king here.......

slowly build up solid non spammy links......

[OldWelshGuy]

As part of your analysis, did you check the cache dates of these links in Google? That is a pretty good indicator of the qyality value Google places on those links. Mya dvice would be to cherry pick the best links, and leave the dross alone.

[lister]

As part of your analysis, did you check the cache dates of these links in Google? That is a pretty good indicator of the qyality value Google places on those links. Mya dvice would be to cherry pick the best links, and leave the dross alone.

Wow thanks for the advice - sorry to be ignorant here but how do i check the cache dates of these links in Google?

T H A N K S

[qwerty]

There's a Firefox extension that gives you right-click access to Google's cached copy of a page, but it's disabled in the current version of the browser.

What you can do is either click the "Cached" link to the right of a page's URL on a SERP, or you can use the cache operator in Google by searching for cache: followed by the URL (without a space after the colon). When you get to the cached copy of the page, you'll see the following text at the top:

This is Google's cache of [URL]. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on [date and time]. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more

[Jill]

I believe the SearchStatus firefox extension gives you a quick link to Google's cache of any page.

[lister]

I just downloaded that app - looks good...

[qwerty]

I've had Search Status for years, but I don't see an option for showing Google cache. It does allow you to go straight to Archive.org's copy of a page, though.

[Jill]

Right click on the pagerank toolbar. (I believe that's part of SearchStatus.)

[Martin C]

Let's say their competitors keep on building better quality links in an effort to displace them in the rankings, and this site keeps on directory/blog/forum/whatever spamming to keep their ranking edge. At a certain point they'll reach a point where their crap backlinks will far outnumber those decent quality links they have pointing at their site. When that happens their site suddenly loses some of the trust placed in it by the search engines, even if they don't involve themselves in any other questionable tactics. Plus they'll be competing against stiffer competition who have done things the right way.

I'm not sure that I go along with this theory - surely if this was the case then organizations would be submiting thousands of links of their competitors to spammy websites - which incidently are nearly always going to be Made For Adsense junk so Google are responsible for much of the junk websites anyway. I have to question if a website that has been approved by Google for Adsense, is then classed as junk/spammy, isn't there something wrong there?

I can see Google giving a backlink no value but websites do not have complete control over who links to them and it would seem therefore wrong to go penalising a website for a backlink by applying a negative value - it just wouldn't work.

Anyone submitting an article to a respectable article directory is likely to have that article republished on a few hundred Made For Adsense website - that is how they get their content.

In this case I'm not sure the competitor is doing anything wrong but trying to build links, a link may not have any SERP value, but it might still generate quality traffic, as in the case of some links that have nofollow, are reciprocal or paid for.

Paid for links may not help towards them achieving SERP and if they are listing themselves on minor directories the traffic it is going to generate I suspect is close to zero - the cost could mount up - all those $5 - I wouldn't do it, but then again I don't think it deserves to be penalised in terms of SERP - probably just not rewarded.

[Randy]

You may have misinterpreted what I said above, or perhaps I wasn't all that clear.

I'm not suggesting a spammy link penalty of any kind. I'm suggesting more of a link reset, which can affect things like trust they have in a site.

For instance, let's say a site has 10 really good quality links and starts a spammy link building project because they're just not ranking well. It works and passes more link value and eventually builds up more trust over several months. Then Google re-examines things as they do a few times per year and notice that the 5,000 to 10 ratio of these really spammy link to good quality links is way out of line with normal, so they decide to devalue those spammy links under the theory someone might be trying to game their system.

While there's not a penalty put on the site, it does lose link value it had previously been getting before those (at one time relatively few) low value links. And the trust that was built up when those links were being given credit. So for those who get caught using such tactics it's probably going to feel like a penalty. Even if it's actually not a penalty, just a correction of previously faulty rankings.

The reason why good sites are difficult for competitors to sabotage in this way is that they're continually building good links. By making good link building a continuous process you're also continually protecting yourself from falling into such sabotage because they're always moving the bar. For those sites it won't matter if the crappy links get devalued, because they were never counting on them to help with their rankings in the first place.

[qwerty]

Right click on the pagerank toolbar. (I believe that's part of SearchStatus.)

Well, whaddyaknow. I've always just right-clicked the circled q. Thanks.