This is a challenge / help request for ALL experienced Bombers:

Possible HUGE hack to exploit:

Ok, I'm in the mattress business. I have a competitor who in the last year has completely dominated the search rankings. I've been trying to reverse engineer what they're doing, partially to learn from them, and also to hopefully find a weakness, etc. but they seem unstoppable.

I know a lot of the juice Google gives to sites for searched terms is based on the inbound link anchor text. I've been "naturally" building my links, but at nowhere near the rate of this company. (the company btw is overnightmattress.com).

I was crawling the forum & found a 2007 post from Kurt mentioning the site http://www.backlinkwatch.com, which offers free backlink analysis (more detailed than any of the services I was using). I like it because it shows you the actual URLs of EVERY backlink, as well as the anchor text used (if any).

I checked the backlinks of my site & a few other competitors & found anchor text about 30-40% of the time, with different terms. I then checked the backlinks for overnightmattress and almost fell off my chair; they accumulated over 6,000 backlinks in the last 18mths, with over 90% of them tightly focused on 6-8 main traffic keywords. Of course, they appear in the top 3 for organic searches for these terms.

My first thought was "this is inhuman!". Then, I just happen to follow a few of the links & this is what really blew me away. They are all blogs, where their keywords (mattress, cheap mattress, etc.) are just thrown into each page, either at the top, "other links", side column or bottom, (for example)

"About Us Privacy Mattress Sitemap"

all very cleanly linking back to their homepage.

Just about all of these sites have NOTHING to do with mattresses, and by looking at the positioning of the links, I really doubt they are all put there this prominent by the blog owners.

My only guess is they found some loophole to exploit.

Below are some of the links & anchor text used. Please see if anyone can figure out how they're doing this! See if you can see any footprints. How can we all do it?

The mattress business is tough enough without having this to compete against...but I'm up for the challenge!

Mike
SWAT

http://www.muscle-body.com/ (anchor=Latex Mattress)

http://www.freepuke.com/articles/new-burnout-content-for-2009/ (anchor=Mattress)

http://blog.eches.net/security/90-days-genuine-license-key-for-avira-antivir-premium-and-avira-premium-security-suite/ (anchor=cheap mattress)

http://film-rapidshare.com/high-school-musical-2-2007-rapidshare-236-megaupload.html (anchor=cheap mattress)