Competitor using Black hat SEO

[Jigsaw123]

I think my competitor is using Black Hat SEO. They are a training institute but when I use the PRO tool to check their inbound links, many are links to porn sites.

Is this illegal? Can i do something about it?

[Jigsaw123]

Hi Irving, thank you for your replies. I am new to SEO. Could you please elaborate a bit . what do you mean by sabotage here?

Thanks.

[irvingw]

if they wanted to sabotage better (assuming it its)  they would include the competitors top keyword phrases in the anchor text in an attempt to get rankings for their big traffic words suppressed.

[Jigsaw123]

Here is the screenshot. This is part of the SEOmoz PRO link analysis.

XMZXC

[EGOL]

I think my competitor is using Black Hat SEO.

Those links could have been placed without an actions done by your competitor.

[irvingw]

it's against Googles TOS, it's not illegal. You can report them to Google and they probably won't act on it. If they keep doing this they'll find themselves a victim of penguin.

My advice is to just keep doing all you can to make your site great and keep it white hat. If they're spam link building it most likely will come back to bite them in the @$$.

Links from adult sites sound weird though because anyone link building can do better than that even if they are spamming -  perhaps another one of your other competitors is trying to knock them out, you should keep a close look at your incoming link profile to make sure no one is trying to get you penalized, the higher you are in the serps the more people there are who want to knock you out of position.