Hit hard by Panda 3.3. Doing some research. Have a question.

Hi there. I'm a relatively new SEO - well new to black hat SEO anyway - and my site was hit hard by Panda 3.3. I've been tracking our site in conjunction with our 5 top competitors and it looks like only one other company took a nose dive over the past few weeks.

One company, though, has proceeded to continue kicking a** in the rankings so I am researching their backlinks right now.

It seems like this company is relying on a strategy of getting links from sites that are primarily used for SEO purposes... not "private blog networks," but rather, sites loaded with articles filled with relevant keywords. They are readable to humans and definitely were written by someone with authority at some point. The site mostly contains internal linking to other pages on the same site but it has an ad for our competitor just ONCE on the sidebar. So the number of OBL's is very low, and as far as I can tell, there is only ONE external OBL - to our competitor's site.

They have hundreds of links coming from subpages from sites like these. I can see why search engines would be confused into thinking these are great sources for backlinks. But to the human eye it's pretty obvious that these are poor quality, even scammy sites.

So my question is, what are these? It's pretty obvious they're run by the same company that features the link pointing back to them, but who is maintaining them? Who is writing these blogs? Isn't Google savvy enough to figure out that they're hosted by the same person (or even if they aren't, can't Google STILL figure it out that the same company is orchestrating this?)

Thanks. And sorry if this is a total newb question... I'm still figuring all this stuff out.

This is a common practice. It's building a private web site network instead of a private blog network. Same thing.

As for Google catching them it depends on how clever they were at setting up the network.

So is this usually done by the company themselves or by the SEO firm they hire? Like is the SEO firm responsible for coming up with all that content?

IS the content spun or unique?

As far as I can tell, it's unique. It might be spun but if it is, it's still pretty well written and human-readable.

How does one go about setting up these sites without it being seen as on the "same server" or C-group or whatever it is? There are people on BHW you can hire to do that, right?

it used to be a good practice but nowadays direct linking from any website has to be considered on so many levels. 4-5 months back i used to rank for social bookmarking service in google (3-4th). I paid $300 to 2 top social bookmarking sites to place an image with alt text and link to my website. Within few weeks i had over 300,000 links from 2 domains and was very strong.

Right now i don't know (i closed the site and moved on to something bigger). But considering about the ROI it was well worth it. So i guess it still works.

You can probably hire them here or start it your own website network

if you can afford it:

buy soon to expire domains with some pr or incoming links, age above 2 years. use different registrars, use privacy, use different names.

pay someone to write articles. not the best quality but unique.

get different hosting C class accounts , put some websites or blogs up. fill it with the content and link your sites... do it slowly. also link some other websites... like wikipedia or any other authority site. dont use sitewide links.

dont interlink your network!

get some links from web 2.0 to your websites... update content now and then...

you should be fine with this.

Would you mind sharing the URLs to one of these sites?