Link farms allowed? Outgoing links hidden behind Flash content?

[midlifecrisis]

Recently, three spots on the first page (including #1) for our main KW ("widget software", over 2 million results) were captured by boiler plate sites which all seem to lead to the same company in India.

All three sites have a "Resources" link on the front page. Clicking "Resources" gets you to a page that has about 10 or so outgoing links and some Flash content. The Flash thing simply displays links to 140 or so internal pages, sequentially named "widget001.htm" and so forth. Those pages each have another 50+ outgoing links to directories, other sites (sometimes leading to the same company but for a different type of widget and again with a similar "Resources" section) etc.

As I understand it, the links in the Flash thing would be invisible to any spider. However, doing a "site:" search shows that all the "widget---.htm" pages where indeed indexed although there are no direct links found anywhere on the site.

Comments, anyone?

[tedster]

I wouldn't say this is "allowed", but more like they're getting away with it for the moment and ranking for now.

By the way, Google does crawl and index the text content in Flash movies - that's been going on for more than a year now.

[midlifecrisis]

That's what I figured but it's been like this for the better part of this year. The positions fluctuate a bit but none of the sites has been kicked out.

edit: thanks for clarifying the Flash issue.

[tedster]

If those rankings are holding up for that long, then I'd assume there's some serious backlinks supporting them.

Here's a reference from Google's blog about crawling Flash: [googleblog.blogspot.com...]

[midlifecrisis]

Y. and Altavista show a couple of hundred links, all from the usual suspects (directories, link exchanges, the whole shebang)

[midlifecrisis]

Update: There now four spots occupied, including #1 and #2. The sites even have more or less identical textual content. Maybe I should start buying links...

[edited by: tedster at 7:32 am (utc) on Aug 8, 2010]

[tedster]

I thought you already checked their links and only found common stuff? Google does explicitly say not to buy links, but directories are fine, and reciprocals are not specifically disallowed. Your analysis might be missing something.

Rather than starting to buy links, it might be safer just to file a spam report, or a "dissatisfied with results" report. Otherwise when the big sweep comes through (as they do) your site could just disappear along with theirs.

I know what you described is frustrating, but if the competition only has a couple hundred links, than you should be able to compete with straightforward marketing.