Reporting Webspam to Google
-
We are in ecommerce, and there are a few review sites that are dominating the rankings for our products. The sites are very good - very well written content (2000+ words) and visually appealing sites. The 2 main culprits are clearly black hat. One site's backlinks are pure spam, and the other is buying footer and sidebar links.
Will ratting them to Google have any impact? If not, any suggestions on how to compete? Our competing pages are product descriptions, and creating a 2000 word product description seems inappropriate. Also, all of these products are brand new, and due to extensive media spends, the search volume is very high. Since they are beating us to the punch by getting good content posted first, they are proving difficult to displace.
-
This is a touchy ethical question for SEOs. I think there are some questions you should ask yourself.
First, are you sure the company in question placed the links? Is it possible that they were the victim of negative SEO that didn't work?
Second, do you actually deserve to out rank them? Is your content truly better? Do people want your result more than theirs?
If you can answer yes to both of these, then I think you can feel comfortable in moving forward with a spam complaint. If not, you risk either kicking someone while they are down, or hurting user experience overall - neither of which are particularly ethical.
-
Will ratting them to Google have any impact?
Yes, but probably not in the way you're hoping. It's pretty rare for Google to take manual action against a specific site just because someone reports it. They've stated in the past that they prefer to solve the issue algorithmically than on a one-off basis, so it can take awhile for the algo to catch up to what bad actors are doing.
If not, any suggestions on how to compete?
Make your site the best resource using white hat tactics and be patient.
-
Hi,
If the site is using spam techniques to rank in google, You can file a spam report at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Silo Structure in the eye of google?
does silo structure has a positive point on Google Ranking or not, and what is the importance of internal linking, how google see the internal linking content as compared to less internal linking, I'm trying an experiment I do a lot of internal backlinking in Website Unionwell as compared to Website B (which has apparently less internal Links) so with your experience in SEO field which site will get traffic rapidly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saimkhanna0 -
Google index
Hello, I removed my site from google index From GWT Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results, Status Removed. site not ranking well in google from last 2 month, Now i have question that what will happen if i reinclude site url after 1 or 2 weeks. Is there any chance to rank well when google re index the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
Is it possible to rank a RE-DIRECT in Google ?
Hi Guys Some help here please would be much appreciated. I have created a super URL re-direct to my Amazon product page. So my question is If I spend time and money build SEO links to my re-direct URL will it still rank high in Google or does Google NOT like or rank re-direct URLs ??? Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Should We Remove Content Through Google Webmaster Tools?
We recently collapsed an existing site in order to relaunch it as a much smaller, much higher quality site. In doing so, we're facing some indexation issues whereas a large number of our old URLs (301'd where appropriate) still show up for a site:domain search. Some relevant notes: We transitioned the site from SiteCore to Wordpress to allow for greater flexibility The Wordpress CMS went live on 11/22 (same legacy content, but in the new CMS) The new content (and all required 301s) went live on 12/2 The site's total number of URLS is currently at 173 (confirmed by ScreamingFrog) As of posting this question, a site:domain search shows 6,110 results While it's a very large manual effort, is there any reason to believe that submitting removal requests through Google Webmaster Tools would be helpful? We simply want all indexation of old pages and content to disappear - and for Google to treat the site as a new site on the same old domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | d50-Media0 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Does Google hate wordpress?
I have my categories pages set to noindex, follow. I deactivated the author and date based archives, and all the /page/2 /page/3 are noindex. Is this the right approach? I had thought about adding some text to the topic of each category page and then changing them to index. I'm using showing recent post excerpts on the homepage. Another other suggestions? I think two of my sites are in panda for no good reason. It seems like non-wordpress blogs in my industry do better than comparable wordpress sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateV0 -
Ranking History Reports
I like that every week I can go into my campaign and see how I did. If I want to keep tabs (reports) every week and continuous record keeping how would I do that? For example, I want to see how we did last month on a particular keyword, should I set up to run a report every week for that keyword and have it emailed to me. Is that the only way to do that or does Moz keep previous history somewhere else? Thanks. PS Another website I help out on recently had a huge jump in pageviews this month. I don't track them in SEOMOZ currently is there anyway to figure out where that traffic is coming from? I am guessing perhaps they moved up in Google. Is there a way to see previous history? i.e. they are 33 last month for a certain keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenhornet770