Big Spammers Ranking In The SERPs

[mrpotato]

I'm noticing some bizarre rankings for a few competitive niches these days, and I'm not sure how Google lets this even exist. Maybe I'm the bizarre one, I don't know but, in some of the more competitive niches, I'm seeing more and more sites pop up with a ridiculous number of RDs (Ahrefs - See Below). So many that it's humanly impossible to even get this many in such a short period of time that the sites are live.

In the same niches, I'm seeing more (what seem to be) hacked sites or PBNs ranking that are literally irrelevant from the niche or topic. Backlinks are irrelevant too. Many of them are non-us domains being used to rank in the US.

I'm also seeing a boatload of 301s which seem to exist with irrelevant hacked sites IMO that just exist and fill the search engine results with complete garbage.

Any idea how some of these sites are able to completely pepper the SERPs and leave consumers with worse search results than if they were naturally built.

What's strange is that I'm seeing more and more of this in various niches, which leads me to believe that Google doesn't care about spam or excess use of irrelevant domains.

I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what's going on here and why. It makes it nearly impossible to come in and do anything with good practice SEO.

Would love to hear from some of the experts here that might have a better idea.

Without calling out the niches, I've shared a picture of the Ahrefs data from a site not built on an expired domain (it's not my site) with crazy links and dominating the SERPs. Would love to hear some guru thoughts on this. Seems next to impossible to compete with this. I'd say 60% of page 1 and 2 are these types of sites, maybe closer to 80%.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Any idea how some of these sites are able to completely pepper the SERPs and leave consumers with worse search results than if they were naturally built.

This is tangentially related to something I mention frequently on the forum. When a new website comes out of the gates hard, it can perform way better than it should be allowed to. Tons of case study sites here in the Lab experience this, and then are surprised around the year mark or so when their rankings and traffic get cut in half.

What's happening is Google is having to use statistical analysis on our sites and these big spam sites. But they need not only enough data to reach a state of "statistical confidence" but they also need that data over a period of time.

That means yours or the spam site gets to exist for long enough before certain data can be collected, and then there's a waiting period for that data to be crunched offline (Panda / Penguin) and rolled back into the live algorithm.

The reason these sites perform really well is because it seems like Panda & Penguin are dampening factors. They don't boost or reward anyone. They exist solely to dampen ranking scores. I figure it's a quality score like 0.96, which would mean you could take your total ranking score which might be normalized to 100 (a perfect score) and multiply it by 96%, leaving you with a 96 score. Someone with a 75 total score dampened by a 0.88 quality score would end up with an adjusted total score of 66.

My point is, these offline filters only drag us downwards. And since these sites that come out of the gates swinging haven't had a quality score assigned to them, they all get to perform like they have a quality score of 1.00 (meaning no effect, no dampening). Then, once the offline calculations run, these guys tank, usually because of Penguin.

It's a typical but more sophisticated churn and burn operation exploiting a window in time where it can really pay off, then it crashes and burns and the 301'd domains with all the backlinks get 301'd to the next target site, rinse and repeat. Probably all kinds of 301's getting switched around like URL shorteners and all the crap we used to do back in the day.

What's strange is that I'm seeing more and more of this in various niches, which leads me to believe that Google doesn't care about spam or excess use of irrelevant domains.

Google cares and actively works to destroy this stuff. It's why there's such a long time delay in the algorithm, to try to make everyone wait until after the offline data is crunched like mentioned above. The main weapons are branding signals, time delays, and Penguin/Panda filters.

Aged domains can bypass the time delays and likely come with some branding signals. This means if you time it right, you can have somewhere around 8 months to 12 months to spray content and links like a mad man, get it indexed, make a bunch of cash, and then lose the "asset". At that point, the previous window of time closed and the new one opens. Move the 301's and start all over.

The real question is, is it worth all the effort?​

Take a look at that image @mrpotato shared and how much organic traffic they get per month... 8.5k monthly. Assume Ahrefs is underestimating even by 100%. That's 17k monthly pageviews. Many of us here have white hat authority sites that do that much traffic daily (and I'm sure some hourly) and have no fear about it crashing down to zero with a penalty one day.

Google has really managed to stop a huge portion of the spammers out there, de-incentivizing it and incentivizing doing it right, especially due to the snow ball effect of cumulative positive signals over time (including time itself). The longer a site is around and more legitimate the content and links and other signals are, the more powerful it gets until you have true passive income at massive numbers. It makes way more sense to achieve that than to spray and pray on rinse and repeat.

 

[mrpotato]

Thank you for the reply @Ryuzaki I really appreciate the breakdown of what's happening here. It makes a lot of sense. Now, for the record, I have zero intentions of taking this approach. In fact, I'd like for them all to go away entirely as quickly as possible.

 

[LinkPlate]

I'm noticing some bizarre rankings for a few competitive niches these days, and I'm not sure how Google lets this even exist. Maybe I'm the bizarre one, I don't know but, in some of the more competitive niches, I'm seeing more and more sites pop up with a ridiculous number of RDs (Ahrefs - See Below).

I have seen these sites show up on flippa for sale and after digging deeper, it became very obvious what is happening. It's black hat SEO and they are taking advantage of a known vulnerability in Google ranking algorithm. They call them "exploits". I call them a short cut to getting de-indexed (eventually)

After looking at the sellers information (on flippa). Those site owners are literally posting like 10 pieces of content, spamming the site with the exploit (which is a standard stacking technique) and bam! They start ranking like crazy for those keywords.

The exploit itself will soon be fixed (as Google always does) and all of them will eventually fall out of the SERPs. When that happens, you will see a ton of people asking about algo updates and WHY did my site just tank? lol

Also, I did a quick analysis on how much money they are making from selling these sites on flippa. On average, they are selling the sites at 1.5k - 2k. Is it worth it to pump content, setup a site, buy a domain, spam it and then sell it on flippa? (Consider the negotiations and all the crap you have to do for the sellers to buy it, etc..) I personally don't think it is and even if it was - I would never want to sell someone a site that I know is spammed (and using an exploit) for quick buck. Why? Karma

 

[mrpotato]

Agreed. TBH, I wish these types of sites would all implode yesterday.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I've even seen more of these kinds of sites listed on proper marketplaces not just Flippa. Super short ranking periods and very spurious income sources/stability and they're still being listed for what seem like crazy amounts. Buyer beware I guess but it's interesting to see an air of collective stupidity developing in the 'lower half' of operators in our market - allowing things like this to happen - more spam sites being sold, more spammy products getting popular again to rank sites etc etc. Makes me wonder where we are in the bubble - as @LinkPlate says it's just a matter of time until Google hits a bunch of those sites and we see all the panic posts on less quality forums etc...