Car leasing links are some of the worst I have seen
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.
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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
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I don’t know if this will help you Patrick, but I found (US based) Lease Trader a few months ago (link below) and was fairly impressed with the site’s design as well as the services that they offer.
http://www.leasetrader.com/
(BTW – Jcyreus dot Com is not in any way affiliated with Lease Trader…just looking to offer something helpful for your research)
What’s a natural link? And how long will links be the best proxy for relevance now that that entire landscape has gotten so muddy?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/19/more-bloggers-raising-money-here-come-the-politics-and-here-comes-my-rant/
http://www.seobook.com/understanding-organic-link-building
Interesting problems for the web/Google to solve going forward.
UK Google is by far the most competitive search engine in the world, hell Google recently had to change the algo to stop our sites from dominating Google dot com. I keep telling myself that not buying paid posts and paid links will pay off, but the future does not look orange. BTW nothing wrong with directories (PR spanked or not) Google recommends you submit to them so submitting it is not spamming or spammy in any way shape or form.
The directory links I meant were spammy were ones from the footer rather than in the actual listings.
O’h right, those are spammy, this guy wanted me to help him the other week, he had been buying 20 a day and he had thousands of links. He was doing very well off it, but I would not go near the site, it will come crashing down on him and I wouldn’t want to be underneath it when it does. It was a shame to turn him away because he had a fat budget.
Shouldn’t that just make it easier for you? You could just report them..
What software do you use Patrick?
All custom software.
Patrick – Don’t you think Google already has a spam team who look at this stuff? Why pick on ling?
Natural links – ha! Define a natural link exactly. A blog link? A forum link? A link from the BBC? A link from a directory? Go one define one, if you can.
If you really must whine and gripe about how some sites simply do well in an imperfect system then why not look at other sites positioned above mling and comment on those?
Some might say that negative seo is unkarmic and kinda crap , but hey If you are on page 2 at position 11 and don’t know how to get to page one otherwise then hey, I can see why such a tactic might be of use. Just remember though, that if you ever get your client to position one then just make sure that every little single thing you did to get them there was squeaky weaky clean, else some SEO with lesser knowledge and talent might just sneak up and report your heiny too.
Anyways good luck in getting those ‘natural’ car leasing links
Ling is a client so I’m not picking on her, just saying that a lot of the links to the people in the top 10 are either paid or from low quality sites.
Oh – well in that case I stand corrected and apologise for attacking what looked to be little other than an thinly veiled attack on a competitor in a SERP.
Your amendment to your opening paragraph makes the position a whole lot clearer. Thanks
I have a vehicle leasing website and the backlinks constanly change but google only shows 6 or so ? – Does google not show all the links that you have ?
We are a car leasing copmany and I have been looking at Lings links, she hasnt got many from directories, mostly blogs etc.
Apparently Yahoo is the best site to use to see which links you have.
I know its bizarre Ive noticed this myself