Over the last year I've been completely confused at why one of my competitors has continued to completely dominate the SERPS (both money terms and long tail) despite having a very weak backlink profile compared to the other sites. They had about two dozen, mostly low quality links, yet were dominating sites that have been around for over a decade and amassed hundreds of high quality, relevant, authoratative links organically.
I could not figure out what was going on, sure they had good onsite SEO (but everyone in the space did), though were doing a bit of keyword stuffing but that couldn't explain it. No social media presence to speak of. Any engagement metrics had to suck since there site was pretty awful.
I finally found the answer yesterday, when I looked at their historical backlink profile using Majestic. They had exact match links from hundreds and hundreds of domains in the historical index. These were mostly on foreign spam sites, mostly high PR, but non-relevant really low quality sites. Obvious links buys.
Here's the thing, according the historical index and my own searches all or most of these links were removed about 12 months ago, probably a proactive Penguin cleanup (they were never penalized). Yet, they appear to be still are dominating the SERPS with these long ago deleted spammy links. I can't really report them to Google for spamming since they removed the links a year ago. But, when do these links actually fall off and stop affecting the SERPS, it's been a year or more in many cases.
