SEO Tycoon

**purk** · 04-11-2006, 02:33 PM

I recently found the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool, which I have to say is great, and after running my first report I decided to investigate my main competitor's inbound links, as advised using Yahoo and not Google, like I have done many times in the past using the Linkdomain: command.

I discovered that most of the pages in the results are links from totally random blogs and forums, usually these pages contain thousands of links to all the 'bad-neighbourhood' sites (those specialising in viagra, gambling, porn and hair-in-a-can etc).

That's little more than annoying, seeing as those of us who design and market our sites like gentlemen put in so much time and effort but what I found next was unbelievable.

The SEOmoz KD tool showed me that my main competitor had a handful of 'authoritative' links (edu, .gov, .mil etc.). This isn't too common in my industry so I investigated further.
It turns out that there's a .gov site (won't mention it here) which handles outbound links with a page stating "whatever.gov is not responsible for [outbound link url]'s site content....." blah blah.

Well my competitor has gone and used this by placing links in these random blogs which look like this: http://www.whatever.gov/redirect.php...ty-buggers.com
The result seems to be that G & Y! treat them as legitimate authority links.

After 18 months of hard-slogg SEOage I'm contemplating dropping a few links in random blogs to see what happens.

Anyone with compelling arguments as to why I shouldn't go over to the dark side can email me at : lost-the-will-to-fight-fairly@these-are-real-tears.com

Better still post here ->

**3pointRoss** · 04-11-2006, 06:44 PM

I would say don't even consider it -

The people at the good search engines (google, yahoo, msn, etc) are not stupid, they spend so much of their time making sure that their engines only return relevent results.

Sooner or later they will catch on to what your competitor is doing, and blacklisted they shall be. Do you want to be in the same boat with them?

Instead focus on getting more proper links. Google doesn't punish you for being linked by a bad neighborhood... as you can't really control it. But they do punish you for linking back to them.

**vangogh** · 04-11-2006, 06:59 PM

I agree with Ross. You can also report the sites directly to Google to make them aware of what they're doing. I forget where on Google's site that is, but I know it's there someplace.

I know the frustration. I've felt it myself often when seeing all kind of spammy sites ahead of me in the results pages. Like Ross said though I think Google and the other search engines are working to catch these sites as best they can and while I know there will always be sites showing up in searches due to practicing the dark side of seo I think more and more will get caught over time.

It can be frustrating, but I still believe in doing things the right way.