I’m working on a backlink strategy for a client and decided to analyze the backlinks of the main competitors in a particular niche.
One of the top competitors has an impressive ranking on a lot of keywords in this niche and receives a ton of traffic. However, their backlinks look shady AF. For instance, they have referring domains like “Jakuli dot com” with 1.2 million backlinks, or “Teknokrat dot ac dot id” (a university website in Indonesia, which isn’t even relevant to this niche) with 271k backlinks, plus a bunch of other questionable source pages.
So, I’m wondering how to explain why these guys are doing so well when it seems like 3/4 of their backlinks are from what I suspect are link farms.
To be honest, I’m new to the backlink game and just trying to figure out how the heck this strategy is working. Any insights?
In my opinion, the most common reason for a site having a lot of shady links yet still ranking well is that it likely has other high-quality backlinks boosting its visibility in search results. This increased visibility often attracts all sorts of bot-generated links, whether you want them or not. I don’t think Google penalizes these anymore unless there’s a clear attempt to make them look legitimate.
Backlinks don’t work on a scale or percentage basis; they’re binary—either good or bad. If Google detects a paid-for backlink, the site won’t have high traffic and good rankings. It’s that simple.
Lesson 1: Link Spam vs. Spammy-Looking Backlinks
“Link Spam” refers to Google’s policy against purchasing or building backlinks for financial or other gains with the intent to manipulate search rankings. It’s similar to the difference between “tax evasion” (illegal) and “tax avoidance” (legal). Link Spam is prohibited, while spammy backlinks are often just low-quality links from dubious sites.
Lesson 2: Link Spam Can Look Natural
Link Spam is tricky to spot because it often appears as natural, legitimate links. Websites with thousands of backlinks can hide Link Spam effectively. Many people penalized for Link Spam might think their links are natural, but that’s not always the case.
Lesson 3: A High Volume of Poor-Quality Backlinks Is Normal
It’s common for websites to accumulate a lot of low-quality backlinks over time. For example, if you have a lot of links on Reddit, you might find 50-100 domains from scrapers, mirrors, or broken CDNs linking to your site after a few months.
Lesson 4: Google Doesn’t Care About Low-Value Links
Google doesn’t bother with low-value domains and what they link to, and neither should you.
Lesson 5: There’s No Toxicity “Score”
If Google believes a site is involved in Link Spam, it will take action regardless of any percentage, scale, or tipping point. There is no specific toxicity “score” that determines when a site is penalized.
It’s not necessarily that they are ranking solely based on backlinks.
1.2M backlinks from one referring domain likely suggests a negative SEO attack rather than them building these links intentionally.
Did you analyze their content strategy and how well-structured and deep their content silos are? What about their domain age and type—is it an Exact Match Domain (EMD) or a Partial Match Domain (PMD)? Have you looked at their best backlinks to see if they come from high-authority and relevant sites? Also, have you conducted a SERP analysis to check what other types of sites are ranking—are they high authority, or is the competition weak? Are they ranking well only for specific search queries, or do they perform well across various search terms?
It would be beneficial to analyze these factors first before diving into their off-page strategy, in my opinion.