Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Recently I discovered that two dynamic scrapper websites in a very popular search sector in Google UK were ranking well for almost every conceivable related keyword known to man.
Both sites were pulling in more Google traffic (according to hitwise) than virtually any other site including the true authority sites in their sector.
On closer inspection I found that the primary reason they ranked so well was because their A-Z of content pages, i.e. links of pages within the site that contained more links to more pages on their site were linked to by many of their own same style templates sites across Europe.
For example the co.uk version would have footer links to .fr, .ie, .de etc etc and on those linked pages would carry the same index page of content. On the other sites they would carry the same links. The effect of this means that they would have say 12 different worldwide websites all providing links to the index of content pages found on each site.
Hence, as each respective sites increases its own Page Rank it means that each websites A-Z index page gains more high Page Rank from these pages pointing to them hence helping every page in each site that’s linked from these pages climb higher and higher in the serps and rank incredibly well.
In both website examples the sites have almost 2 million pages indexed using this method all driving incredible levels of traffic to their respective websites.
Now clearly, Google either doesn’t have an issue with sites doing this kind of linking technique (but I thought it was against G T&Cs) or its technology isn’t clever enough to pick it up.
Eitherway, I would like to know if this is a reportable matter or if reporting the two sites would just fall into the no reply pile or if there is an effective way to report these sites where they will genuinely get reviewed by Google staff.
Anyone any ideas?
Rich
Expect no specific reply - and often there's no immediate manual action either, except in the case of malware or adult content on inappropriate SERPs. I have had quick responses in those two cases - and they are the only kind of violations I've ever reported. But your input is always "taken on board" and used to improve future algo tweaks.
The cross-linking you describe may not be considered very spammy because it uses country code TLDs (ccTLDs) and the rankings for each are limited by geo-targeting.
A) it was like flipping a light switch--no links from blogs before and then Kaboom! tons of links.
B) The blogs have absolutely nothing to do with the purchasing site's topic and the links being given by the blogs are encased in spammy one-off pay-per-post style postings.
C) All the blogs seem to originate from asia. They're written in english, but judging from the photos on each blog they are all asian bloggers. Now why would 500 asian bloggers suddenly be writing single postings about something like (for example) the american widget association, all using the same keyword to link to this site they've assuredly never heard of?
This seems to me to be a clear instance of spammy mass link buying to manipulate the serps. Should I even bother reporting it?
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:51 pm (utc) on July 27, 2009]
Also check if the domain name is in a surbl database such as Spam Assasin's rulesemporium.com [rulesemporium.com]. If so it is certainly compromised. And check the site's IP at the same time - use Firefox's ShowIP addon to get it.
[edited by: tedster at 10:02 pm (utc) on July 27, 2009]
[edit reason] made the domain a live link [/edit]
