Feindish Competitor - New BH Technique?

Ok guys,

This thread is kind of a compliment to a thread I will post a bit later on my SEO strategy. So far this strategy has worked well, but I have a competitior that is doing wayy too well. He has put a site on the first page which has no reason to be there - backlinks, onpage seo, cloaking - none of these.

Ok - in this small, local highly competitve niche, there has been my competitor for two years. He has one main website, and a would be 'backburner' - both are eseentially competitors for each other. I'll call the main one blue and the second website green.

'Blue' used to be on the front page, and this website and its identity are what he uses to promote his business with his partner. Green is his own pet project and has been almost abandoned for two years. .(He screwed me over and destroyed my old legitimate business - not to compete, but because I wouldnt pay for his SEO skills. )

So I launched a competitor to his website and got onto the second page pretty quickly. 'Blue' then slowly fell down the rankings, and I went up until I passed 'Blue'.

Victory was mine I thought. Nope. 'Green' suddenly appears from nowhere and goes in at the number three spot on page one.

The SERPS for this niche seem ordered by:

community .org/edu backlinks
good solid SEO - keywords, titles backlinks, anchors
and amoutn of content

The first page is literally ordered by the content size of each website. So -

1: 157 PAges
2. 122 PAges
3. Green - 15 pages - WTF ???
4 98 pages
5. 65 pages
6. 62 pages

This goes on for over two pages - including my site at 35 pages at the moment.

The thing is:

Green appears to have:

1. No cloaking
2. Only 10 backlinks from unimportant websites
3. Not visibly update in a year
4. 15 pages of content
5. No hidden text using either Jscript or CSS
6. No multimedia content
7. One stumble upon (low for this niche)

So how has Green shot up to number three. And why isn't the dude using these techniques for Blue - which used to do massive business????

I suspect he intends to dump his business partner - hence the abandonment of Blue and the focus on Green.

What on earth could his technique be if its not

backlink domination
keyword domination
cloaking

This isn't a fluke, I have watched Green slowly pass me and go to SERP positon 3 over the period of a few months. Also, dude sends me taunting emails about it.

Any ideas ?

Make a check with IBP or similar programs to try to figure out what keyword he have optimized for. Check his incoming links and what keyword he uses in the anchor text.
Copy his strategy and make it better.

I have outranked several of my competitors with low PR sites just cause I have used better and more accurate keyword phrases.

Unfortunately too many who doesn't have the fundamental SEO knowledge and it's not very hard to outrank a not so good optimized site. If you (or anyone else) need to study up some on the SEO part I personally love the Stompernet course which is kind of expensive but can be found on trackers like thevault*bz... Still you have to become a member but it's fully possible if reading through their member application guide and do as it say's there. Anyway.. That course really made it for me. I started with SEO for little bit over a year ago and in a couple of weeks I outranked all my competitors for my chosen keywords.

If you already know the SEO you should know then it shouldn't be any problem but I guess you wouldn't had asked here then

Still I am sure that you can figure out what your competitor have been doing and when knowing you just have to make it better. That could be a fun discussion here when you are ready for beating him in the SERP war.

just because you cant find links doesnt mean they arent there, you can build a link farm that blocks yahoo from indexing the pages (noindex,follow) or even robots.txt yahoo out and he will have links but yahoo wont list them, dont underestimate how far you can cover your tracks if your good!

Hey Guys, I based my site on his primary site(blue), which uses the same keywords as green. Green hasn't changed in the last few months but has shot past me, whilst blue has died on its ass and fallen behind me.

I have done stompernets, and there is a lot there that this guy doesnt know about, I *think*. One thing

He has 17 backlinks, but if I search for the domain name without the site: operator in Google it comes back as 485. Could this be the reason? He is spamming his url outside of an anchor. Should that even work?

My index.php page has dropped to page 8 for my main keyword. A secondary page is still on page 2. If I do a search for my brand name, my index page comes top. What has happend to my index page for it fall from page 2 to 8 and could it relate to the improbable rise of 'blue' the competitor site with visibly poor SEO?

ghands said:

My index.php page has dropped to page 8 for my main keyword. A secondary page is still on page 2. If I do a search for my brand name, my index page comes top. What has happend to my index page for it fall from page 2 to 8 and could it relate to the improbable rise of 'blue' the competitor site with visibly poor SEO?

Click to expand...

far too many questions without enough information, if you are interested in me taking a look, feel free to shoot me a pm however it now sounds like the stage where i will be charging for the work though

Sounds to me like age is giving him a big boost. If he hasn't changed anything and his backlinks are low, maybe his domain finally hit that "sweet spot" for an age-related boost.

Hi Trophaeum,

When I have a little spare cash, that would be a good idea. I have figured out some of what he is doing ( I think...). Will post here when I know more..

all it takes is getting listed on a few blogs, or a good social bookmarking post to get upt here

The thing is those links don't show up at all in his baclinks. He has less than 20. Thats whats puzzling me. Is it possible to get link juice from links that Google doesn't show up in link: operator serps? I realise he may have more links that Goolge chooses not to show, but surely they are worthless links?

I've discovered something that may be of interest. He has only 18 links showing in Google, but in Yahoo he has 400. Could it be that this is the secret of his great SERPs ?

As I posted on your other thread:

"Google only shows a small percentage of the links they count, unless you're the webmaster and are looking inside your webmaster tools. Yahoo shows just about everything they've got. You should also look at Alexa and AltaVista. Google is only good for discovering a few good linking locations but is useless for competitor's link research."

As I posted on your other thread:

"Google only shows a small percentage of the links they count, unless you're the webmaster and are looking inside your webmaster tools. Yahoo shows just about everything they've got. You should also look at Alexa and AltaVista. Google is only good for discovering a few good linking locations but is useless for competitor's link research."