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Hi Sorina,

Thanks for the response. That makes sense as the content isn't completely duplicate.

Hi there,

I've been working on a pretty dated site. The product pages have tabs that separate the product information, e.g., a tab for specifications, a tab for system essentials, an overview tab that is actually just a copy of the product page. Each tab is actually a link to a completely separate page, so product/main-page is split into product/main-page/specs, product/main-page/resources, etc.

Wondering if canonicals would be appropriate in this situation? The information isn't necessarily duplicate (except for the overview tabs) but with each tab as a separate page, I would imagine that's diluting the value of the main page? The information all belongs to the main page, shouldn't it be saying "I'm a version of the main page"?

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.

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.

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

There have been a couple other threads concerning this topic so I apologize, but I have an iteration on the main question that has not been answered.

Crawl Diagnostics is giving me a bunch of 302 temporary redirect notices. For example, here is a page title URL:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/0073380.htm

and here is the redirect:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm?1=1&CartID=0

The first link is actually a child product of:
http://store.in-situ.com//Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm

Volusion tech support told me they believe most of them are meta redirects but could not find any documentation on them. All the other threads concerning this have said to either change the 302s to 301s, which I don't think is possible, or to add a nofollow tag.

My question is do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product? Should I be passing on the linkjuice if neither of those pages are of high value?