Hey guys. I've been working on improving my ranking by increasing my backlinks considerably. I noticed that a high-ranking competitor of mine has tons of backlinks through blogs. The problem is that the blogs that write about my competitor's website are pretty ugly/generic and tend to post the same information. I am assuming that my competitor is paying for blog write-ups and that the blog owners have about 30-50 blogs where they post the same information.

1. Am I correct in my assumption or is there something I am not understanding?
2. Do search engines in any way frown on this activity or lower your ranking if you get caught?
3. If this is a good technique, how do I do it because it seems to be working for my competitor?

Thanks in advance

As you probably know, backlinks from a wide variety of sources play a major role in ranking. As of late, links that appear within content, such as blogs, carry the most weight, since they come off as being the most natural.

1. I cannot guarantee one way or another whether your competitor is definitely paying for the articles, although that seems to be the case.

2. Search engines, especially Google, definitely frown on this activity. Over time, they catch onto most of it. Sometimes they just discount the backlinks while other times they actually penalize the sites involved.

3. Like all "black hat" SEO techniques, they produce fast results in the short term, but once discovered (and they all eventually are) then you can end up severely penalized.

The approach you mention above does sound like spam. However, back links in blogs are OK. Best approach is to create LINK BAIT, which is GREAT CONTENT on YOU SITE that BLOGGERS WANT to link to.

Pay per post - AKA Advertorials are OK to, so long as they are UNIQUELY written. The SAME article on hundreds of sites is considered duplicate content and may hurt more than help.

Writing same information in same pattern could lead to duplicate content, go for unique content that add something new to every products you attempt to review.

Something to be careful of too, is whether or not the blog uses nofollow for the links, which most blogs do. There are a few select blogs out there that don't, such as mine, but that's just one more aspect you need to be careful about.