Mediaboss Marketing

Googles Matt Cutts has put out a new Webmaster Help video discussing how to alert Google when your competitors are engaging in webspam and black hat SEO techniques. The video was in response to the following user-submitted question:

White hat search marketers read and follow Google Guidelines. What should they tell clients whose competitors use black hat techniques (such as using doorway pages) and whom continue to rank as a result of those techniques?

So first and foremost, I would say do a spam report, because if youre violating Googles guidelines in terms of cloaking or sneaky JavaScript redirects, buying links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, all those kinds of things, we do want to know about it, he says. So you can do a spam report. Thats private. You can also stop by Googles Webmaster forum, and thats more public, but you can do a spam report there. You can sort of say, hey, I saw this content. It seems like its ranking higher than it should be ranking. Heres a real business, and its being outranked by this spammerthose kinds of things.

He notes that are both Google employees and super users who keep an eye on the forum, and can alert Google about issues.

The other thing that I would say is if you look at the history of which businesses have done well over time, youll find the sorts of sites and the sorts of businesses that are built to stand the test of time, says Cutts. If someone is using a technique that is a gimmick or something thats like the SEO fad of the day, thats a little less likely to really work well a few years from now. So a lot of the times, youll see people just chasing after, OK, Im going to use guest books, or iIm going to use link wheels or whatever. And then they find, Oh, that stopped working as well. And sometimes its because of broad algorithmic changes like Panda. Sometimes its because of specific web spam targeted algorithms.

Im sure youve heard of Penguin.

He references the JC Penney and Overstock.com incidents, in which Google took manual action. For some reason, he didnt bring up the Google Chrome incident.

This is actually a pretty timely video from Cutts, as another big paid linking controversy was uncovered by Josh Davis today (which Cutts acknowledged on Twitter).

So my short answer is go ahead and do a spam report, Cutts continues. You can also report it in the forums. But its definitely the case that if youre taking those higher risks, that can come back and bite you. And that can have a material impact.

Hes not joking about that. Overstock blamed Google for an ugly year when its revenue plummeted. Even Googles own Chrome penalty led to some questions about the browsers market share.

Go here to see the original:
Matt Cutts: Here’s How To Expose Your Competitors’ Black Hat SEO Practices