Black Hat Link Building Ethics Question

[anneoaks]

I have taken on the SEO/Inbound duties for my company and have been monitoring some of our competitors in the market space. In June one of them began a black hat link building campaign that took them from 154 linking root domains to about 7500 today.

All of the links target either /header or /permalink/index and all have anchor text along the lines of "Windows 7 activation code." They are using forgotten forums and odd pages, but seem to be finding high DA sources to place the links.

This has skyrocketed their DA (40 to 73), and raised their mozRank, mozTrust, and SERP positions.

Originally I thought to report it to Google, but I wanted to wait a few weeks and see what the campaign did for them and if Google would catch on. I figured adding 81K links in 2 months would trigger something (honestly, if I was able to find out they were doing it then it's got to be obvious).  But they have grown every week and no drop in rankings.

So my question is would you report it? Or continue to wait and see?

Technically they are not a "competitor" in the strictest sense of the word (we actually do sell some of their products as OEM), but I find the tactic despicable and it makes my efforts to raise our rankings and DA seem ineffective to people not in the know about SEO.

Interested to see everyone's responses!

Taylor

[Anti-Alex]

Old post but for anyone that feels that waiting for Google to penalize someone will take too long or not work... here's an example of a major competitor of ours getting hit on the last:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/therichest.org

It took about a year and a bit. We even offered $XX,XXX to purchase their sites, and after discovering their techniques, just waited it out to see their huge decline.

[anneoaks]

I'm not sure it implies harm. If a competitor doesn't pay taxes, it doesn't directly harm my company, but it is wrong and it may give them a temporary (if extremely risky) competitive advantage.

I see the same situation here. The linkbuilding doesn't directly harm my company, but it does give them a temporary competitive advantage in a manner that Google has said is wrong. Manipulating the system is breaking the rules, which is ethically wrong. It doesn't matter that it happens all the time, it doesn't matter if a legitimate or illegitimate business is doing it.

Ultimately I wouldn't necessarily report a company that wasn't paying taxes to the IRS, nor in this case am I going to report the site's linkbuilding activities to Google. But in a purely ethical sense I should. I guess that was more the question.

[Carson-Ward]

"If you knew a business was doing something wrong offline, would you report it?"

Yes, but wrong implies doing harm to another person. If people are being harmed by visiting the site, or the business isn't legitimate, that's another case altogether. I'm not sure I'd agree that using these tactics is wrong when the business is legitimate.

I certainly don't have a problem with those who want to report artificial linkbuilding; I just choose not to spend my time policing linkbuilding practices.

[anneoaks]

Hi Carson,

I agree I have little to gain from reporting them from a business stance. It's actually fun to watch and predict when things hit the fan for them.

But to me reporting is about keeping things right. I don't really agree with Hall or Wall. Online should be no different than offline. If you knew a business was doing something wrong offline, would you report it? You wouldn't be able to justify allowing banks to continue to fix prices because some employees might fired if they got caught, so how could you justify allowing crappy SEO tactics to continue just because some people might get hurt. Egregious example, but the point remains. On a scale of 1 to 10, link spamming may be a 1 compared to the banks 10, but that doesn't mean its not wrong.

I certainly have sympathy for innocent people who get hurt by the consequences of other's actions, intended or unintended, but that is not enough (for me anyway) to say I don't care that the wrong thing is happening.

The faster a bad tactic is made invalid, the faster people might move toward better practices, which ultimately puts less people at risk.

I guess in the end, I'm uncomfortable saying "google will take care of it without me" because I want to be part of the solution.

[artdivision]

Hello,

Do not fall to the trap of reporting your competitor, spend your time in being productive by focusing on your online brand building instead, find out what are people's concerns when looking for activation codes and create beautiful content that will make you differentiate in the market. Thats how you should be spending your time. Black hat SEO refers to money making sites. Its how much you spend VS how much you make till you get caught as most people said above. This is why most of the high PR links they have are rented and not permanent and they pay $100-$200 for them to be there. He can rank temporarily (yes temporarily, he will get hammered soon - SAPE links were finished last week and took all the web sites with them) but he will be gone/sandboxerd sooner or later while you will always be there. Sustaining your ranks and reputation will benefit your business much more than a rank one on google and if your boss cant see that, maybe he should join a quick marketing course

[MoosaHemani]

Like others said that Google will eventually caught them but I have seen in my personal experience that it take a long time to get the website turn down from the SERP rankings. I have seen 1^st position for a website for few money making keywords and their link generation tactics are all black hat!

I guess Google look in to these areas after the penguin refresh and turn down the websites accordingly which seems to be a long time in my opinion! I guess Google should consider taking quick action in this regard!

Your request as a single source might not help much but yes if many people complain against the website tactics there is a strong chance that Google take action within less time! (just a practical thought ... no evidence about it!)

Hope this helps!

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Taylor,

As others have said, a site building so many links with aggressive anchor text is going to get caught and penalized eventually: probably on the next Penguin refresh, if not sooner. We see this a lot in some of the spammier SERPs where churn-and-burn tactics like this are still the norm. What often escapes notice is that a lot more SERPs used to be covered in spam - "insurance" was horrible, for example - but they are now filled with legitimate brands. Eventually (though not soon, at this rate) there will be little space left for these tactics as sites providing real value move in and solidify their positions.

As far as the morality goes, I suppose it depends upon your moral philosophy. Everyone has an opinion on reporting spam, but let me instead ask you some questions: What do you have to gain by reporting the competitor? Will a report make your business thrive? Does reporting them make the web better for users? Could the competitor learn about it, and turn a spam attack (that probably won't work) on you?

Personally, I'd ignore it and focus on my own business. I have almost nothing to gain by taking others down. In fact, I might be better off if they continue doing cheap tactics while I build a real business. I may eventually fill out a WMT report on them if I was second to them in dozens of SERPs. I wouldn't feel bad about it, either, if it made the web a better place. Here are some other opinions:

http://joehall.me/seo-outing-is-immoral/29/

http://www.seobook.com/media-literacy-seos-or-why-seo-outing-bad

Rand has a discussion about it here:

http://moz.com/blog/aaron-wall-and-i-debate-the-open-discussion-of-webspam

[JerryCrockford]

That's a good response Alex.   Short term or long term game.  Need to keep reminding ourselves of that.

[Anti-Alex]

Anything with "Windows 7 activation code" will eventually get hit by Google whether you decide to report it or not. It might take a day, week, month, year but Google will eventually find their links spammy and do something about it. That's really the gamble with black hat. How long will it take Google or someone to kill the project? The idea with blackhat though, is you burn the domain or burn whatever the project is once it's no longer profitable. If you plan on working on the same brand for a long time, whitehat is really the only way to go.

They'll see a short boost now, but once they get hit, it'll be a huge hassle to fix everything.

[Jonathan1979]

Can you post their url?