Should this site be penalised by Google?

I was reading about the activities of this site on a blog recently and I was wondering what people here thought of their actions.

moneyexpert dot com is ranking top on Google for the keywords mortgages and loans

Looking on Yahoo Site Explorer moneyexpert dot com has over 6million back links pointing to its site (more links than the home pages of the BBC and Wikipedia). When you look at these back links more closely most are on random offtopic sites that have nothing to do with mortgages or loans (paid link? / link spam?)

Worse still if you click on moneyexpert dot coms top listing for mortgages you are redirected to another page!

Do you think these actions are black hat and should they deserve some kind of ranking penalty, maybe a minus 30 or somthing similar.

What do we think? Will Google deem this as being against their webmaster guidelines?

I ran into something like this, and started the thread below:

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/how-is-google-really-valuing-backlinks-140017.html

At worst a one way link has no affect, at best it does help....

If they're using doorway pages then that's very blackhat, of course they could have just changed their site structure and the redirects are genuine 301's to the new pages and Google simply hasn't updated it's records yet...

BBB

The site has very great stats. Just look at below:

Google Page Rank: 5
Google Back Links: 8,380
Yahoo Back Links: 7,007,642
MSN Back Links: 7,060

These stats are telling the whole story about this site. Really awesome back links, especially in Yahoo. But I didn't find any black hat SEO in this site so far like doorway pages, hidden text etc.

Any more suggestions please!!

The Great Khali

Definetly a doorway page of some kind. If you just type in the URL there is no redirect at all. This only happen when you click on their google listing



How can you say their links are awesome. They are on sites that have nothing to do with their site or their keywords, nearly all the links appear in the footer like link co-ops.

And what about the huge number of links? Hardly genuine for a site like this

Yes,

May be quality of links is not awesome, but look at the figures. These are in thousands. Yes, it's true that quality have always upper hand over quantity, but the links are links and these figures are surely giving benefit to this site. You can't ignore the huge no. of back links of this site. Quality matters but somehow quantity also matters.

Suggest me!!

The Great Khali

figures are crap khali, you've been here long enough to know that you need relative links to your site for them to have a great effect on the site.

Them having over 7 million yahoo links leads to the suggestion that they are just using an automated article directory submitter and also a automated back link creator.

i wouldn't be surprised if they got owned by the se's in the near future...

Please suggest them some nice name Jinxxx, otherwise their SE name will also be crap like their back links!!

it's the volume of links.

Personally I think the "unrelated site" linking is a somewhat blown out of proportion .. every link counts (except from a spam site). If it's from a quality site then it gets more link power.

If you are concerned that the site is using dodgy techniques then report them to Googles spam team.

I would put money on the fact that about 90% of the links are discounted completely, but of course G cant ban them for the links that are coming in but only discount them, but surely if the majority of links are in fact irrelevant then google must know something is up.

No those links were not discountered and the excessive use of digitalpoint link network is what gave that site its high search engines positions.

Its nice to see that it only took google 18 months to eliminate excessive use of over 12 million backlinks on a well known automated backlink excahneg for a site ranked top 10 in most finance related keywords.

I also suspect action was only taken when money supermarket complained about them

I have been competing with these guys for a year now and for my finance keyword they have dropped from #1 to #9.

It has been a long time coming!