Is this website doing something black hat?

I saw a website with only 22 articles that is having about 10 visits a day according to Ahrefs.
The niche is travel, and is getting traffic from keywords that normally are impossible for such a small website.
I checked the backlinks and here I found something unusual. It only have blogspot websites with domain authority 0 or 1, no other backlinks.
But the blogspot websites look all dead and with only one page indexed, the home page. Also their content look very bad spinned.

How is that website managing to rank with such bad backlinks?
This is the website: historic-places.eu

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the content looks OK to me, I don't see anything "bad spinned" on the site, but I only checked a few articles picked at random, so I don't know...

Unfortunately I don't have access to SEO tools, so I can't analyze the site, but by what you're describing it seem like the site has hidden backlinks. That is if we assume that the site is ranking for "impossible keywords" (which I'd have to check or take your word that they're impossible ), otherwise it could rank because of content and site structure (which is good by the way)...

tazarbm said:

the content looks OK to me, I don't see anything "bad spinned" on the site, but I only checked a few articles picked at random, so I don't know...

Unfortunately I don't have access to SEO tools, so I can't analyze the site, but by what you're describing it seem like the site has hidden backlinks. That is if we assume that the site is ranking for "impossible keywords" (which I'd have to check or take your word that they're impossible ), otherwise it could rank because of content and site structure (which is good by the way)...

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Not on this website is the spinned content, but on the blogspot sites linking to it.
The content is good on the website, but there are a lot of other websites with good content that can't rank for anything because they don't have authority.
To be on the first page of Google for keywords like "netherlands landmarks" or "historic places in germany" with a such a small website in 2024 is quite impossible.

shaggy99 said:

To be on the first page of Google for keywords like "netherlands landmarks" or "historic places in germany" with a such a small website in 2024 is quite impossible.

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apparently it's not impossible

Anyway, they either have hidden backlinks or their content is good (which it is). They also have a clean and topically relevant website, so this helps too...

shaggy99 said:

Not on this website is the spinned content, but on the blogspot sites linking to it.

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oh, my bad! I misunderstood...

Those blogspot links are everywhere nowadays, you can ignore them and try to find the real backlinks

TO be fair, what's ranking are their images:



So it might looks good on paper, in reality, the websites probably not getting much traffic.

shaggy99 said:

I saw a website with only 22 articles that is having about 10 visits a day according to Ahrefs.

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There is nothing strange here. I have got an experience with new web-site with 50 articles and 10-50 real visits from Google daily.

I just ran that through my Serpstat account and can see they are ranking for all low volume longtails.
Longtails in general are low in competition and easier to rank.
The history of that domain is clean from wayback.
It's very closely like a niche EMD targeting a sub niche with low competition longtails.
Also, the domain is consistent since 2020 so age will be around 4 years.
The content is good quality and well structured.

They are ranking for multiple SERP features:
https://prnt.sc/YGAlAYy8PJQEhttps://prnt.sc/Fo9NB6JdGqMi
https://prnt.sc/VgFIBTJOMiYu
Nothing great but that site is doing decently in terms of traffic and targeting relevant longtails.
And it's an aged website so with relevant consistent content have build trust in the eyes of search engines.
They have done the most important thing correctly that's research and organization of content and topics.

A similar common Blackhat practice for years has been by extracting all sentences from ranking pages & then creating an autoblog with content cloud for all those sentences.
This didn't involve any Seo tools analysis or research pure hit and trial Blackhat scaling low traffic content.
This method has now evolved a lot with AI but the basic core remains the same.

Just saw they are also ranking in multiple geo's:
https://prnt.sc/iqlsqNoD9UzFhttps://prnt.sc/kYDckZU0Hque
They are actually doing pretty well.

And I won't be surprised if there are any pbn links supporting the site.

Probably a PBN

No they are not. I don't think so because they are good in traffic, keyword and ranking. I think they use PBN in my view.

shaggy99 said:

I saw a website with only 22 articles that is having about 10 visits a day according to Ahrefs.
The niche is travel, and is getting traffic from keywords that normally are impossible for such a small website.
I checked the backlinks and here I found something unusual. It only have blogspot websites with domain authority 0 or 1, no other backlinks.
But the blogspot websites look all dead and with only one page indexed, the home page. Also their content look very bad spinned.

How is that website managing to rank with such bad backlinks?
This is the website: historic-places.eu

​

Click to expand...

nobody does black hat for 10 visits a day I don't think it uses PBN or anything else, it's just a website, with a few clicks a day.

it doesn't take long to do something similar on your domain, and you'll see

GhostVision said:

nobody does black hat for 10 visits a day I don't think it uses PBN or anything else, it's just a website, with a few clicks a day.

it doesn't take long to do something similar on your domain, and you'll see

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I know that is very unlikely for a website with only 10 views a day to have been done something black hat, but the blogspot backlinks looks very weird. And I don't think a website could rank only by itself in 2024 with only 22 articles. But maybe the articles were written before the invention of Chat GPT when Google could let you rank only with good content.

shaggy99 said:

I know that is very unlikely for a website with only 10 views a day to have been done something black hat, but the blogspot backlinks looks very weird. And I don't think a website could rank only by itself in 2024 with only 22 articles. But maybe the articles were written before the invention of Chat GPT when Google could let you rank only with good content.

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Who told you that now you can't rank only with good content?

site age 6 months, searches per month by main keyword 1000 , 7 articles on website, 0 backlinks = 1st place in google = 100-200$ per month profit

GhostVision said:

Who told you that now you can't rank only with good content?

site age 6 months, searches per month by main keyword 1000 , 7 articles on website, 0 backlinks = 1st place in google = 100-200$ per month profit

View attachment 315184

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Maybe in your case it's a very small niche and your page is the only one with that search intent, and that's why Google let you be on the first position without backlinks. But the age of micro niche websites is over for a long time. But if a bigger website only mentions your keyword in text, Google will rank them in front of yours.

shaggy99 said:

Maybe in your case it's a very small niche and your page is the only one with that search intent, and that's why Google let you be on the first position without backlinks. But the age of micro niche websites is over for a long time. But if a bigger website only mentions your keyword in text, Google will rank them in front of yours.

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maybe yes maybe no