Competitor outranks us through sponsored results?

[transition]

We have a site that has roughly 1,500 inbound links with strong bias on relevancy and quality links. We have a competitor with roughly 3,500 links (of which most are generated 'spam' pages w/ google adwords). His links are not of high quality but quantity. Most links of his links are accumulated by leaving the 'Sponsored Results' option on in Google in AdWords. This has been verified by checking inbounds with both Google and Yahoo.

It seems the quantity is more important then quality with inbound links. He's taken a 1 year old site with poor content and semantic structure and out-done our 2 year old site with 1,500 links and great content.

Am i missing something here or are these 'spam' pages with purely sponsored content actually worth something? Checking his inbound links in Google show a majority of sponsored links from Google.

[lakr]

Hi, same situation in my niche, quantity outranks the quality.! I guess your competitor owns a keyword-stuff domain.

[followgreg]

I have seen that more often recently as well, at least for the past couple of months.

Websites with poor content, very little content, cheap backlinks, and again the good old cheap link buying scheme do surprisingly well.

There is nothing you can do except waiting, do not hold your breath, for Google to find a way to make their SERP cleaner.

Google still does not make the difference between good content or non sense. They also seem to have issues with determining what is a good link or not, even more since the beginning of this year.

The latest changes GG has made + those that intended to fix the Google bowling situation ended up with many very low quality sites being ranked amongs 1,200 gorillas - these sites have nothing to offer but it seems that results stick.

we will probably know more in september...

[lakr]

I agree with you, FollowGreg.

we will probably know more in September...

-

wake me up when September ends.

[transition]

It seems a bit surprising someone like Google can't tell the difference from these affiliate sites showing Googles own ads. Any cached links from these affiliate w/ AdWords ads should not be indexed.

I thought Google was trying to make a push to remove sponsored results from the index? Sure looks bad if they can't remove their own sponsored links.

[tedster]

I'm not sure that this competitive analysis is accurate. To my knowledge, Google does not count Sponsored Results links in their algo.

[Bewenched]

I noticed the same thing in our realm. Found that our competitor .. well one of them has like 6 keyword and link stuffing domains... they're so badly done they look like a sitemap with thousands of pages with direct links to the other site.

I reported them, but who knows if that really matters.

[followgreg]

tedster >> I thank that transition was talking about cheap obvious link schemes (on sites with a lot of adsense...thin affiliates) or paid text links, at least was how I and the others ( I think) interpreted but you are right to clarify - I have doubts now.

transition >> were we talking about the same thing?

[lakr]

I want to include one sentence:

Quantity of links may help you rank well for certain keywords, but in order to be an authority site, quality matters.

Lkr

[centime]

@ OP

I don't entirely understand what you mean, but I think it is extremely unlikely that Google or any search engine is counting adwords adverts as inbound links for any website.

Infact, it is probably impossible.

The Google adwords adverts , I would think are redirected via Google internal analytics, so not a direct link.

Re analyse an you may find other links on the same page

[transition]

followgreg: Correct, these guys have tons of links from AdWords affiliate sites with no real content on their sites. The affiliate sites are pure advertisements and no substance at all.

[p5gal5]

Transition -

Quick question - how many pages does the competitor's site have? If you query google on "site:competitordomain.com" - how many pages does it show?

[Tonearm]

Paid links are currently helping a lot?

edit:

Via AdBrite for example?

[edited by: Tonearm at 3:31 pm (utc) on Aug. 15, 2007]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:09 am (utc) on Aug. 16, 2007]
[edit reason] accidental edit... restored as posted [/edit]

[transition]

p5gal - Competitor site comes in with 2,980 links. Lots of the links are duplicates because of inconsistent urls. For example: widget x might have two urls:

http://www.example.com/product/title.html

and

http://www.example.com/product.asp?product_id=100

Both of these pages have identical content. Our site has 2,970 pages and we've been very careful about different URL's with identical content.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:16 pm (utc) on Aug. 15, 2007]
[edit reason] changed domain.com to example.com [/edit]

[transition]

Tonearm - paid links from AdWords being indexed is what i'm talking about. Those affiliate sites that only show ads for a keyword.

[Lorel]

I wouldn't put so much weight in ranking #1 vs #2. It's what's in the title and description of the search results that prompts one to click on a search result. You might want to check to see what is showing up in search results for your site and change your title/description/text accordingly.

[transition]

Lorel: We're talking #1 vs. #9 for our primary keyword.

[tedster]

Have you verified that these links are actually Adwords? That just does not compute with me. Thin pages with imitation "Adwords-style" links ... just maybe.

[Tonearm]

I agree with tedster. I don't think Google would count AdWords links.

[anallawalla]

I sometimes see crawlable AdSense ads on the sites of major content partners, e.g. Sedo ads on parked pages. But even these are double redirected (via sedo and then googleadsyndication), so I can't see any possibility of the ads helping any advertiser.

[p5gal5]

Thanks for the clarification on size of the site - it blew my theory away, though. :)

I often get Google Alerts for "links" to our sites from sponsored listings on other pages. These are usually MFA with little/no content and are easily disregarded.

To see where all this juice is coming from, I would check out the competition's top ibl's and the ibl's to THEIR ibl's. It's all about the trickle-down of link juice.