Today I’ve been doing some competitor backlink analysis for Ling (one of my clients) and I am totally amazed by the amount of spam in the car leasing industry.
First of all I got a list of the top 10 sites for the query “car leasing” and plugged then into our link analysis software. This pulls data from Yahoo Site Explorer plugs it all together so we can look at all the potential link targets.
Starting from a database of 10,000 links I’ve been looking through it for hours and have yet to find a single natural link to any of the top ranking sites. The links are from scraper sites, sites that are disguised as scraper sites by SEO firms wanting to link to clients, directories with PR penalties and other low quality spam sites.
In fact, the only links I can find to sites ranking in the top 10 for “car leasing” are from sites that apparently don’t pass link weight. How is this possible? (this is a rhetorical question, I know exactly how it’s possible - 50% of these sites are still passing weight and the choice is to either get links and rank while running the risk of a penalty or don’t get links and don’t rank).
It seems like link buying is much more of an issue in the UK than the US. Thanks to the strong pound cash rich companies in the UK have been able to buy up every single link on the web that relates to their niche. A modest £100,000 a year link buying budget pretty much buys your way to the top of any industry over here for the price of a couple of TV adverts.
If anybody can find some natural links then please let me know because the situation is a joke.
You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.