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| | Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO | |
255 points by throwmesomeseo on Mar 20, 2017 | hide | past | web | favorite | 102 comments |
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| Hey guys - for some time our startup did organic link building and technical seo. We ranked for a year approximately as our closest competitor. Since the end of 2016 he is increasing the number of incoming links massively by adding bridge sites. These have keyword heavy domains and keyword heavy content with all links pointing to their site. Contrary to seo consultants opinions we've ask ("don't worry") this (for all I know) works for them. They have now left us quite behind in rankings. As we are still not a known b2b marketplace brand and depend on seo this is hurting. Ahrefs/Semrush does not report other large changes in their technical seo or link structure beside this massive buildup of bridge sites. What would you do? We don't want to engage in the same tactics, should we? |
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I'm surprised no one has pointed this out; you can report them for paid/spam links in your Google Search Console. It doesn't solve the problem but it will speed it up, especially if it's a manual PBN (private blog network) and not 'web 2.0s' as they say in the SEO world (links from Wordpress, Blogspot, and other already-hosted varieties). Google is pretty good at finding how the PBN is tied together - usually by looking at the hosting, and it will kill their rankings for a long time.
Also make sure to check your inbound links for negative SEO attacks. Since the most recent algorithm updates will penalize page by page for negative/spammy links it's possible that's happening to you as well. Google likes to pretend like that negative SEO doesn't exist, but it's probably the easiest way to climb to the top of rankings if the others are unaware of the intricacies of SEO. Search console is the only authoritative way to find those, but ahrefs will generally update faster and give you a head start. (I spend about 5 hours/week disavowing negative SEO links, and that's after I mostly-automated it).
In the meantime, you might want to put a little more effort into getting links pointing to you, if for no other reason than to not leave yourself in such a precarious position.
Feel free to email me and I'll look into it if you need more help. (I am over SEO at a YC startup trying to fix payday loans https://www.semrush.com/info/lendup.com+(by+organic), so as you can imagine we've seen it all... I hope).