Case Study: Competitor RANK #1 for keyword in Google for 36k NoFollow & 600 DoFollow MOSTLY PingBack

meb

Case Study: Competitor RANK #1 for keyword in Google for 36k NoFollow & 600 DoFollow MOSTLY PingBacks ONLY!

Dear SEO experts, In GSA software and forum, it states that pingbacks are typically not useful backlinks,

but my competitor Ranks No.1 based on 36,000 Nofollow Pingback Links, and 600 dofollow, Its a relatively new site ( around 4-6 mths old only )

But In AHREFS, it shows his URL rank 78, Ahrefs Domain Rank 45, and he was blasting 2000 nofollow PingBacks EACH DAY even from the start to reach 36,000 backlinks in a few Months!

I want to follow his strategy , which is in a competitive real estate industry, to rank No.1, but is it a good idea to blast 2000 NoFollow Pingbacks EVERY DAY from the 1st day?

His 600+ DoFollow Backlinks are not that strong either, AHREFS Url ranking Maximum rank 40+, Domain Rank Max rank 70+,

So im guessing his power comes from his NoFollow backlinks.

Dear SEO experts, would like to hear from you about this strategy cos it seems like a safe strategy and looks like hes there to stay.

Also, if this is good, where do i get that big number of Pingback Links?

Thanks Guys!

banel

Maybe somehow he hides his backlinks? Check his robots.txt, see if he is blocking something. Also, what does majesticseo says about his website?

meb

Hi Banel thanks for reply.
You mean it's possible to hide back links?
How do I check robot.txt?

I am only subscribed to Ahrefs, maybe il try to use majestic free version to check, n update on this page,thanks

mania

He (or she) could be using redirects. im not 100% but maybe you could load the competitors backlinks into scrapebox alive checker and set the options such that only 301s are marked as alive. They you could check the back links to those sites etc.

banel

He can hide using 301s, just like mania said or he can just block sites like ahrefs from crawling his backlinks, that s why i said to check with majesticseo. Of course, you can use the free version.
To check robots.txt just go to www.domain.com/robots.txt. Replace domain.com with your competitor's domain. If you can, just copy paste the robots.txt here on this topic.

meb

Thanks guys, better if i PM u the results of robot.txt?

meb

ok the top 3 lines show this while the 4th line is competitor's Url

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

meb

i mean 30,000+ nofollow links in a just a few months, this strategy must reli be good to be on no.1 for so many months.

meb

oh ya, one more thing to note,

His Anchor Text is 97% based on 1 anchor text, the rest of his 3% are varied,

isnt that like defying what most SEO experts preach about diversification? :O

jpvr90

@meb are these backlinks new?
in ahrefs you see large spike recently?
what is monthly search volume for keyword?

rogerke

@banel

What does his own robots.txt have to do with hiding anything?! To hide a PBN/301 redirect you have to block those domains from backlink crawlers, not your money site. And if this guy is correctly blocking them MJ12Bot (Majestic's UA) will be blocked as well. 

@OP

Why do you think his dofollow backlinks aren't that strong? Where are you basing this on? Nofollow backlinks don't pass link juice and although many people do believe they pass some kind of other positive ranking signals, I'm pretty confident that's just rubbish. Either he's hiding something, or those dofollow backlinks are stronger than you think. 

BTW, does Ahrefs even counts nofollow backlinks towards their ranking stats? I know Majestic doesnt, but not sure about Ahrefs.

banel

@rogerke : isn t possible to hide your own domain from backlink crawlers just like you re hiding you pbn/301s ?

meb

@ jpvr90, the whole website is only since around Sept 2014,

not really new, he started pumping around 1000-2000 links per day i think, then gradually slowed them down.

552 searches per week for this main keyword.

i wanna paste the .jpeg here from ahrefs how do i do it?

meb

URL Rank   78

Ahrefs Domain Rank   45

Backlinks   37 K

Referring Domains   1.6 K

meb

text	36,843	100%
dofollow	596	2%
nofollow	36,247	98%
redirect	0	0%
image	6	0%
form	0	0%
Governmental	0	0%
Educational	99	0%

rogerke

@banel

Sure you can hide your own domain, but it will only result in backlink crawlers not picking up external links pointing from your domain. Unfortunately there is no such thing as a robots.txt code to let them dump all data of backlinks pointing to your domain. 

meb

Based on the 2% DoFollow backlinks shown in Ahrefs, highest Domain Rank is 69.

Highest Ahrefs URL Rank is 40.

and has 100 edu backlinks.

I dunno that much about SEO, but highest Domain rank of 69 and Ahrefs URL rank of 40, i can do that manually too. In fact , many of my ,manually created Web 2.0s blasted with GSA are already way better than that when shown in Ahrefs.

Yes i also heard Nofollow Links mean no link juice cos google dont follow them, but at the same time i also heard that google likes high quality wikis or PR 9 or 10 Domains even when they are nofollow cos it shows authority about  the website that these PR 9-10s are talking about or linking to.

Out of his 2%/ 596 backlinks, my site has way better dofollow backlinks than that, mine are 90% dofollow and ahrefs DA and URL rank is higher than his dofollow.

So im guessing that nofollows do really play a part in this topic?

Also, most major social networks with PR 9-10 are nofollow, but i heard that social signals like these count too to google even they dont pass link juice?

Guys, pls let me know if u need any more snapshots of my ahrefs findings.

Cos still cant find a reason why not too strong 596 dofollow links and massive 35,000+ nofollow links can rank so well?

rogerke

@meb

Why so fixated with these external metrics?! They don't mean anything to Google, so I'd really stop focusing on them.

Regarding nofollow links and authority, I don't believe that either. First authority in Google's eyes is Pagerank (*) Secondly, it wouldn't make sense because it implicates bought (nofollow) links would pass value as well. 

Seriously stop focusing on these external metrics, nofollow links, social signals and these other red herrings and start doing actual link analysis.

* 

Molex

Is that my money site? Hahaha seems the same backlink profile lol

meb

Molex, haha yeah maybe. looks good right?

lets see, what does the url ist letter start with? haha

rogerke, yes but when u compare external metrics with page ranks, they are the same in ratio. ahrefs shows both dofollow and nofollow and anchor text variations etc.

For this topic on hand,

this guy is ranking No.1 for many of his sites, based on 36+k ( 98% ) nofollow pingbacks and 2% not so strong dofollows, and anchor text overall is 97% on just 1 keyword.

And at the top of this thread, it seems like SEOs here do not also know how this is possible, cos if he blocks his links, it will affect his site too.

Do any other experts here know why this is possible with this link strategy?

Seems like only a couple of experts are commenting though,

cos this strategy defies all SEO preachings.

As for nofollow links, maybe a PR 9-10 website makes it site nofollow so that SEOs wont spam their site and make it appear as a spammy site, but i think in google's eyes, these PR9-10, even nofollow, shows authority to them