Competitor Rockets to #1 and I'm looking at keyword stuffing. Will Google catch up with it?

[Ticket_King]

We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign.  They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position.

In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term.  I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven

tags on said page.

Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc.  Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven

tags, and possibly adjust their rank?  Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?

[Ticket_King]

Now that I can see the real reason that our competitor is number one for one of our key search terms, it's because they bought hundreds of links from spam blogs.  This just occurred in the past 30 days.  Here's the big question: Do you report them or see if Google will catch up?  I don't use black hat link building, but I would rather not draw attention to this issue if there is a chance for any "blowback" coming our way. I would use my secondary Gmail account to do the reporting, but I worry that Google would do something more than just look at that site for that term, and that rank.  Any thoughts?

[Ticket_King]

They moved all key items on their home page to top-left, and their content updates are better optimized to rank for the key search term.  The older version of their site focused more on their company name, less about the product.  As for their previous rank, they would never get above page three.  I didn't even track them from week to week, becuase they were not worth my time.   After reading what you said, and now looking at it with that information, they just figured it out.

[EGOL]

A couple questions...

Was this competitor homepage optimized for this term before the redesign?  Where did they rank for this term?

You say that this site is pretty well branded... often a site like that can decide to use the homepage to go after a term and.... BAM... they will be there the next day.  Also, powerful sites can add a new page an.... BAM... be at TopSERPs for a brand new term the next morning.

Sites like Amazon can do a lot of damage when their sellers move into a product line.

About the

and KW stuffing.  I don't think that will hurt them.  Lots of people use

for design reasons so I don't think that google will whack them for it.  A year ago one of the strongest sites in the "hosting" niche had their persistent navigation links all as

... the dominated with that and when they removed it in a redesign their rankings didn't change.