How is this possible?

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this just baffles me and makes me a bit hopeless. :ugh1:

So, there's a main website that focus on a specific niche. For the sake of not giving out the U.R.L (don't want any of you sly people to abuse this somehow ) I'm going to use a fake scenario.

Main website = website design , extention

Then there's about 40 - 50 other sub niche domains such as

search engine optimization
online marketing
web design
cms website design

etc...

These 40 - 50 other sub niche domains all have the same theme, same logo and exact same look (template). They all use the same images on the inner pages as well as directly link to each other. (Some even have duplicate content and the on-site seo is absolutely horrible).

However, the main E.M.D has about 25k backlinks to it... probably about 24.9k of these are irrelevant backlinks, that's pasted in the footer of websites that used their services.

How is the main E.M.D + a lot of the sub niche domains getting #1 spot and not being penalized?

Please tell me if I'm losing it here, but this just seems like these people are doing stuff that's considered "very shady" and against Big G's guidelines but they are putting it in the open and nothing is happening.

And another thing that I might have to mention, their domain age is over 15 years. Domain Authority 40.

Thoughts?

It takes Google a bit of time to penalize sites, so they eventually will get banned.

ghackseo said:

Please tell me if I'm losing it here, but this just seems like these people are doing stuff that's considered "very shady" and against Big G's guidelines but they are putting it in the open and nothing is happening.

Click to expand...

You'll find examples like yours in many niches, but one thing is for sure: Their days are counted.

This is quite ridiculous to compete with :/

Nonetheless, thanks for reassuring me that I'm not losing it

ghackseo said:

probably about 24.9k of these are irrelevant backlinks, that's pasted in the footer of websites that used their services.

Click to expand...

If this bakclinks are without anchor text they have some power. This links are follow or no-follow?

Ya, it's annoying like hell, but the next Pinguin update is probably coming soon

There are a lot of websites like this out there. The truth is that Google love mumbling the same thing but there are still a lot of black hat SEO techniques that are still viable. The best thing for you in my opinion will be to try and replicate their approach to some extend.

Just keep watching throughout the updates, you'll see these sites disappear. You can do this with SEMrush.

Yeah their days are numbered, bro.

I know this was quite a good technique a few years ago, building subdomains with a lot of pages/content and pointing links to the main site and it ranked quite good, didn't know that people are still doing this and more importantly that it still works...

coitza said:

I know this was quite a good technique a few years ago, building subdomains with a lot of pages/content and pointing links to the main site and it ranked quite good, didn't know that people are still doing this and more importantly that it still works...

Click to expand...

Thing is, the domain and sub domains are over 15 years old, they just updated the "theme" of all the sites recently but the "technique" has been active for, well, 15 years... Yet they still rank well. 1st on Google for a VERY competitive keyword + for various other long-tails. Also, these sites are all based on location, e.g locationkeyword.com , longtailkeywordlocation.com etc etc etc. But the main reason I think they aren't completely blacklisted off google... is because this has been active for so long? Not sure if that means anything to google but I'm 99.99% sure if I tried this method today and scaled it much larger I would see my sites drop like flies...