Blogspot based site outranking everyone in my niche?

I've held back from asking about this for a while, because I figured one of the algo updates would have taken care of things, but that's not the case, so hopefully you guys might be able to shed some light on this.

There's a university student with a blogspot based blog (with a normal URL that is only his name) that is currently outranking just about everyone within my niche. I've looked into his backlink profile and he has more than 10 thousand links to his site, and the majority of them are because his posts get pulled into the sidebar / blog feed of other blogspot based sites.

I've analyzed his anchor text, and for the most part it's all pretty natural; there are very few instances where the anchor text used matched for some of the search terms he's ranking for. As I write this I can't help but think to myself that perhaps emulating his "natural backlinking strategy" would help out my sites, but I have no idea how he's ranking so well when so many of his links are from blogspot sidebars.

Has anyone else encountered this? Also; would this be a good approach to take on my own (presumably via RSS feed)? I don't think the domains he's linked from are actually placing his link there, I think his blog's link is being automatically placed into contextually relevant blogs. Is it possible to do this with a non-blogspot site?

Behold the power of blogspot.

A lot of blogspot blogs are ranking well right now. They get scraped and shared all the time, giving a natural flow of hijacked syndicated content juice back to them. Plus those sidebar blogroll links are pretty strong since most are on related, active, big, blogspot blogs themselves.

sounds interesting,

can you please tell us more about your niche or this particular blog URL with some keywords he is outranking you.

This is epic. As blogger in the first place has high PR it is easy to rank and index pages. i got a blogspot that earn me $200+ a month search for maplesecrets in google.

Any ideas?
Same here with some other web2.0 properties

Blogspot is well reputed and will get easy backlinks. You can check your site's reputation on mywot.

If you look from the "natural backlinks" perspective, links from other blogspots are natural - people published the blogs and his blog was automatically linked. Of course, Google will not penalize their own sites with "unnatural link warning" - it would be crazy if they did.

Welcome to the new google....just shows that their algo isn't anywhere near perfect.

What exactly do you mean by sidebar links?

skrape said:

Welcome to the new google....just shows that their algo isn't anywhere near perfect.

Click to expand...

I agree with you, Google is not a near perfect search engine. they might be favor blogspot more because they owned blogspot domain.

I have a blogspot blog that is outranking all websites in my niche, and it earn about $800+ per month from adsense. So there is power in blogspot, but i always backup my databases, am sure any day any time, the site might be deleted. I don't trust google products.

T2tkid said:

I have a blogspot blog that is outranking all websites in my niche, and it earn about $800+ per month from adsense. So there is power in blogspot, but i always backup my databases, am sure any day any time, the site might be deleted. I don't trust google products.

Click to expand...

Nice man!

A link is a link. And every link he's getting is helping his site.

This is true life story. Google gives more power to blogspot then aged domain name nowadays.

I'm glad to see some replies here; I didn't see any replies at the end of last night and was worried nobody else would have any input on this.

I've dug a bit more into my competitor's site, and now I'm even more perplexed. First off; the guy's site / content is set up through squarespace... yet he's somehow still able to get his content to feed into the sidebars of blogspot sites. Here's another doozy: his site is COMPLETELY duplicated between two different URL's (http://www.example.com, and http://www.example.squarespace.com), both of which are completely indexed.

I can only imagine that his site is pulling into other people's blogspot sites somehow via RSS, but since I'm not even completely sure now if his site is at all related to blogspot (perhaps squarespace builds off the blogspot platform?), I don't know if this is the case.

If anyone is truly interested in looking into this a bit more, PM me and I can provide some details about the site; I just don't want to place his URL openly and have every single forum ready scouring his site

Yup.. blogspot rank quite easily.
Glad to know you all are aware about it as well.