Question about my competitor

Denis Lofgren · Nov 27, 2022

I analyzed my competitor today (spirituality and mental health niche), and I found out that they have thousands of redirects from adult or payday loan sites. Most of their articles are ranking in the first three positions in Google, they got over 300k backlinks over the past month, and the traffic is still growing.

How can something like this even work?

I don't know if I can put their link here (this is my very first post on BHW)

so here are screenshots.

sageshark · Nov 27, 2022

No serious business builds such spammy backlinks for themselves. It could be possible that their some other competitor has been busy doing this negative SEO stuff for them? The result of their spam backlinks could be visible in coming few weeks and you will see the decline in their rankings if they do not disavow all these bad links.

Denis Lofgren · Nov 27, 2022

sageshark said:
No serious business builds such spammy backlinks for themselves. It could be possible that their some other competitor has been busy doing this negative SEO stuff for them? The result of their spam backlinks could be visible in coming few weeks and you will see the decline in their rankings if they do not disavow all these bad links.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

I wonder how long their popularity will last. Maybe they just had a vision for quick money? Who knows. I checked their backlink profile today because I found them on a marketplace offering to publish a sponsored post on their site for $550. I initially thought their income from Google Ads has decreased, so they want to make some extra in this way. The seller of the sponsored posts speaks Ukrainian, and many of the redirects are from Russian/Ukrainian sites, so I don't think it's a negative SEO attack.

sageshark · Nov 27, 2022

Denis Lofgren said:
Thanks for your thoughts on this.

I wonder how long their popularity will last. Maybe they just had a vision for quick money? Who knows. I checked their backlink profile today because I found them on a marketplace offering to publish a sponsored post on their site for $550. I initially thought their income from Google Ads has decreased, so they want to make some extra in this way. The seller of the sponsored posts speaks Ukrainian, and many of the redirects are from Russian/Ukrainian sites, so I don't think it's a negative SEO attack.

May be you are right. But if that is the case then too it should not work for them.

This is because someone who is willing to spend $500+ for a guest post will perform a due diligence before buying from them and once they find out the spammy back link profile then they will certainly not buy from them.

By the way, I have a question may be any experienced community member can answer - how is it possible to rank at the top of SERP for even a short period with back links from spammy adult websites?

Ponti93 · Nov 27, 2022

maybe they are using an adult site ads netowrk

itz_styx · Nov 27, 2022

what people fail to understand is that backlinks dont always have to be from the same/similar niche sites.
sure it looks cleaner, but for someone who doesnt care if the links come from adult or payday sites it can work just as well.

fb3003 · Nov 28, 2022

sageshark said:
No serious business builds such spammy backlinks for themselves. It could be possible that their some other competitor has been busy doing this negative SEO stuff for them? The result of their spam backlinks could be visible in coming few weeks and you will see the decline in their rankings if they do not disavow all these bad links.

this
and also do note that most shitty links are ignored by google. just because a third party tool shows you shit load of shitty links, does not mean that google does the same.

Tran Agency · Nov 28, 2022

maybe they already run ads on social platforms, you should try it

sageshark · Nov 28, 2022

fb3003 said:
and also do note that most shitty links are ignored by google

Well, don't you think that Google punishes the sites with shitty links, even if their competitors have built those for them? Isn't it a responsibility of an active and vigilant webmaster to keep check on the backlink profile of their site?

fb3003 · Nov 29, 2022

sageshark said:
Well, don't you think that Google punishes the sites with shitty links, even if their competitors have built those for them? Isn't it a responsibility of an active and vigilant webmaster to keep check on the backlink profile of their site?

no and no

more and more when I check with top sites in difficult niches, those who are ranked at the top, hardly ever look at their backlink profile. they don't care about shitty links. using disavow tool is telling big G that you are doing seo, and big G don't like that.

GOSO · Nov 29, 2022

fb3003 said:
using disavow tool is telling big G that you are doing seo, and big G don't like that.

I disagree with this, I was hit hard with negative SEO. Low quality backlinks and porn related. It crippled my targeted keywords for over a year. The disavow tool helped me tell Google to remove them. Now I'm ranking well again.

Beckz · Nov 29, 2022

GOSO said:
I disagree with this, I was hit hard with negative SEO. Low quality backlinks and porn related. It crippled my targeted keywords for over a year. The disavow tool helped me tell Google to remove them. Now I'm ranking well again.

As far as i know google doesnt care much about those "toxic links".
They ignore them, if they dont like them, but they dont penalize you for that.

Just google "john mueller penalize bad link" or something like that.
He has a lot of statements about that.

GOSO · Nov 29, 2022

Beckz said:
As far as i know google doesnt care much about those "toxic links".
They ignore them, if they dont like them, but they dont penalize you for that.

Just google "john mueller penalize bad link" or something like that.
He has a lot of statements about that.

I get that, but by disavowing the negative SEO backlinks. Within months, my site was ranking again.

Negative SEO will screw up your website, unless you disavow. Its why Google gave us access to it.

Beckz · Nov 30, 2022

GOSO said:
I get that, but by disavowing the negative SEO backlinks. Within months, my site was ranking again.

Negative SEO will screw up your website, unless you disavow. Its why Google gave us access to it.

Within months there could have been a hundred reasons why your website started ranking better.

My guess:
Google has no way of knowing if someone is buying a ton of cheap links, someone else is buying bad links for a competitor, or if those bad links were created somehow without intend automatically.
Thats why they wont punish you for that.
The disavowing tool is something you can use, you dont need to use, and you can just ignore it at all. Thats what actually john mueller from google said.
As long as you just do positive stuff, like creating nice content and such, your website will be fine.

Jev_bh · Dec 21, 2022

sageshark said:
No serious business builds such spammy backlinks for themselves. It could be possible that their some other competitor has been busy doing this negative SEO stuff for them? The result of their spam backlinks could be visible in coming few weeks and you will see the decline in their rankings if they do not disavow all these bad links.

Can competitors place bad backlinks to bring their competition down?

sageshark · Dec 21, 2022

Jev_bh said:
Can competitors place bad backlinks to bring their competition down?

Yes. Competitors often build Spammy back links for you and if you do not pay attention to your back link profiles health and keep disavowing such back links they will harm your site in long run.

Many SEOs claim that Google now ignores such negative links but nobody has a proof yet. It is always better to be safe and alert about your back link profile.

Jev_bh · Dec 21, 2022

sageshark said:
Yes. Competitors often build Spammy back links for you and if you do not pay attention to your back link profiles health and keep disavowing such back links they will harm your site in long run.

Many SEOs claim that Google now ignores such negative links but nobody has a proof yet. It is always better to be safe and alert about your back link profile.

So back links pointing to sites that are completely unrelated to my site would be classed as spam links?

for example I have a site in business and I have back links pointing to a porn website?

sageshark · Dec 21, 2022

Jev_bh said:
for example I have a site in business and I have back links pointing to a porn website?

Yes. You got it right.

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