Invasion of new Chinese domains in positions 2-8

[gford]

This is something new to me, but perhaps others have experienced it.

There is an online DVD product that sells really well and now I am seeing chinese domains, all relatively new (1-3 days old up to 30-40 days old) dominating position 2-8 on one big keyword and top 10 on many other related terms.

The fun part is you go to the site and its the exact same on each.

They also all have backlinks from fairly high authority chinese sites.

They have Google's #. We have reported quite a few of these since they are selling a product illegally as they just make DVD copies and sell at near 100% profit.

I am just shocked at how they have infiltrated google top 10 serps so masterfully.

I should rephrase that and say I admire their skill on that and am quite jealous. :D

Others see this?

[tedster]

Sounds like quite a cooperative network going on. I've seen something like this in one SERP a while back, but it didn't last too long.

[gford]

I should note on the chinese domain names, they are TLD org com net, etc, just whois shows owned by someone in china, they dont even go for privacy

[tedster]

Interesting. The case I saw a few months ago involved .cn domains hosted in the US

[indyank]

They also all have backlinks from fairly high authority chinese sites

That could well explain why they are ranking high.But it is definitely not that easy to do with new sites. Is this keyword fairly competitive?

[scottsonline]

For lesser brands in our industry the top five spots are filled by Chinese knockoffs. The manufacturer in the US ranks well below the sites overseas. New and disturbing trend.

[almighty monkey]

It's common enough knowledge that spamming backlinks, along with good onsite optimisation, will get you into the top 10 for just about anything (so long as you spam enough, of course).

It'll also get you banned a few weeks later.

I guess, if your product has a high enough profit margin and you sell enough in a short space of time, then this tactic will still be enough to make a fast buck. To be honest, there's not many industries besides cheap dodgy knockoff manufacturers who's profit margins are high enough to justify this sort of 'slash and burn' technique.

For example, I wouldn't do this for my clients, because I'd quite like to be able to invoice them again in 3 months time.

[gford]

For the term I am looking at it is very competitive.

I am pretty sure they do get killed but then they just pop up more sites and actually never lose their lock now. In the past 12+ months I'd see 1 or 2 pop up and then disappear, now its most of page 1.

[bwnbwn]

I search some very competitve terms and have yet to find one of them. Mind sending me a term to look up to see and study.

[g1smd]

For certain knock-off products "made in China", 70% of the SERPs are for fake goods... even after some 40% of the listings have already been removed after many hundreds of submitted DMCA complaints. Some industries have a tough battle against the scammers.

[Petrogold]

Folks! What ar the terms they use? Google never knows this trick?
Who the webmasters are experienced or experts? We know you will not tell us, but for knowledge at least. I read millions pages or thousands of sites like claiming such, but never did know the blackhats.

[g1smd]

"Louboutin" is one search term where 300 results have already been removed from the first 20 pages (of 10 results per page) due to DMCA requests. Even after that, more than 70% of the remaining results are for fake goods.

This obviously isn't scaling well, where a manufacturer has already filed several thousand DMCA requests and still Google shows thousands more sites that need the same action taken to get them removed.

[tedster]

Last year at PubCon I heard about some kind of coalition between search engines and the authentic manufacturers (and their distributors). This problem is immense and that much has been acknowledged. Clearly, a practical solution has not yet been found.

This goes beyond some ranking trick - it violates the law, not just Google's guidelines.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I just saw 3 identical sites ranking 1-2-3 for the same music related product/term. I can't see any difference in looking at the sites closely which makes me think they are using some kind of cloaking for crawlers. I'm not seeing what's different in the code.

[indyank]

"Louboutin" looks to be fairly competitive for spam......right from the word go...lol

[commanderW]

I did some research on the example term Louboutin. Very enlightening!

First result is the official website. Second is a discount site registered in china.

First thing I notice is that the official site is all flash.
the discount site has lots of real text.

Next thing I notice is that the discount site has a blog associated with it.
Now here's the great part. The topics of this blog have 2 main threads -

One thread is about news items with the word christian in them ( because the real designers name is christian louboutin!) How about that?!

The second blog thread has posts that are all in very broken english (babelfish?), offering advice on how to tell fakes from the real thing. I know that one of the tricks of the infamous Bangkok gem scam is to teach the customer how to tell a fake gem from a real one, then sell them a fake one. Is this the same gag?

Results 6-10 are similar. lots of real text and most have blogs too.

Given the statement posted above by Tedster

Last year at PubCon I heard about some kind of coalition between search engines and the authentic manufacturers (and their distributors).

I suspect that the official sites number one position is an artifact of the Google/Industry coalition. Only results 3-5 are legitimate looking retailers. after that it's scammy looking discounters and then a list of DMCA deletions.

And so I believe it is possible that in terms of SEO, the scammers have the legitimates beat. Plain and simple. Real text (but fake merchandise), where the official company has real merchandise ( but fake text).

Then there's that blog thing. I learned something from this. Stories on Christians. Quite a neat way to draw in traffic and direct them to the other links for blog posts on Christian Louboutin boots ;-)

Maybe the lesson is that corporations need to give up on all the fancy flash and get some coders in there.

[yaix2]

Those sites don't even have backlinks and domains only a few days old, how can they rank that high?

[commanderW]

Those sites don't even have backlinks and domains only a few days old, how can they rank that high?

The site I checked at number 2 position was hosted on a server with a site with a similar name. This similar site was registered July 3rd 2010, and redirected to the site I checked for, which was registered on Aug 31. so there is a redirect game going on. Maybe this has something to do with it. I don't know for sure, about this kind of page ranking though, just an idea.

[gford]

You will find many of the domains are less than a week old and rank top 10. The niche I am looking at STILL has positions 2 through 8, and 10. Ridiculous..

[Vamm]

The terms you mention (boots-related) are most favorite in a forum spam we get. We were getting up to 100 messages a day at times, and our forum is, eh, small and low PR.

[HuskyPup]

Those sites don't even have backlinks and domains only a few days old, how can they rank that high?

Because Google Instant loves keyword domain names and/or domains just stuffed with keyword text.

It's all over the darned place not just branded products.

[indyank]

Those sites don't even have backlinks and domains only a few days old, how can they rank that high?

Hello, as someone said before, there is a 301 redirect going on and don't go by what you see to this site alone.If you look further, you will know the obvious.

[g1smd]

The "discounter" sites are selling fake goods, not discounted authentic products.

The Chinese fake sites are also very heavily promoted through Adsense. There are thousands of sites for each of hundreds of keywords.

Someone somewhere is making millions...

[scottsonline]

@huskypup It's like 2004 all over again. Today we noticed a drop in a keyword that brought us maybe 50 clicks a month. The #1 firm that replaced us has that keyword on the homepage 47 times out of 212 words. It's jammed in <h> seven times. It's nonsensical but it's first.

I learned something else tonight doing research in depth. If you play by the rules you lose. For probably 20 moderate traffic keywords it surprised me that the #1 site had over 200 linking domains on that keyword and usually over 3k individual links with the exact same keywords. We are talking about 200k impressions a month per term and without fail not one of the top three tonight on all of those terms had less than 100 domains linking/under 2k matching text links. Many look like afgrrys.com/dfhetjdsa literally gibberish sites but obviously link banks. That shocked me a little as I figured and was always told that would get you banned in google. I now believe those that say the sites on the other end are devalued but not the buyers.

Anyway these are all US sites. So it's not just the foreign sites as I saw a competitor tonight that went from 47th to 3rd in about a month as links increased by 1000s on one super competitive keyword. So long as google rewards a site with perhaps 40k clicks for one keyword set on one campaign....it's only going to get much worse.

[HuskyPup]

Anyway these are all US sites.

Yep, in my sector all the keyword domain, keyword stuffed sites I am seeing are US companies, all selling one specific real world product but also constructed as MFAs and crosslinked with about 50 other keyword domains each selling an alternative but specific product.

And it seems to me that if one puts in the title bar "The world's No 1 visited site" or "The Internet's Largest" then it's almost a guarantee of a minimum top placing!

[np2003]

You can achieve top 10 results using hidden DIV layers filled with SEO anchor text as well. Google seems to be abit slow these days at catching spammers. Why fight the spammers? Just join them.

[supafresh]

I asked Matt Cutts about this very problem last year at pubcon after the search engine smack down.

He said it wasn’t Goog's job to police the internet and that if they are selling fake stuff it’s up to the manufacture to fight the battle with the Host.

[gford]

Supafresh - perhaps the wording of your question should have been:

"How can obvious spam sites dominate multiple positions of page 1 for competitive terms"

I don't see this problem as pervasive on other SE's but honestly I don't study those SE's like I do G...

[graeme_p]

He said it wasn’t Goog's job to police the internet and that if they are selling fake stuff it’s up to the manufacture to fight the battle with the Host.

I can understand that Google cannot decide site rankings on the basis of trademark disputes.

On the other hand it is Google's job to keep spammy sites out of the SERPS, which is what is alleged to be happenning here.

[g1smd]

Further developments: [webmasterworld.com...]