Reporting Webspam to Google
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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