Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Has anyone ever reported a spammer and actually seen them de-ranked?

White Hat / Black Hat SEO

859

UnderRugSwept last edited by

I have a few competitors outranking me using black hat SEO. I reported them to Google, and I'm just wondering if Google will even look at it. What has been your experience with this? Has anyone ever gotten results?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1
webfeatseo last edited by

Only once has a site I reported been penalized in any way. It will probably not happen for most people
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Jinx14678 last edited by

I think there are alot of people who would say it is a waste of time, and just let it work itself out while focusing on your own campaign, as the time you spend could be better allotted to your endeavors, as opposed to getting on the "Report Train"

With that being said... Personally it would depend on what they are doing.....

Hope this helps

w00t!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Is there proof that disavowing backlinks in GSC help to boost rankings in Google?

Hi Guys Let's say you have a website and you got some questionable back links or lower quality ones. Does anyone have proof that after disavowing back links helped in the rankings or had some positive effects? I am concerned that Google will place our website on their radar and instead possibly demote it or smth. Lastly, if disavowing is the way to go what criteria do you use to disavow backlinks? So if you get questionable back links over time, should you disavow ongoing as well? If so how often? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz

0
Click Through's for ranking

Back in April of 2014, Rand performed an experiment to determine if Google clicks-throughs made a difference on rankings. He Tweeted and asked people to search on a specific term, and then click on a specific listing, to determine if the immediate clicks made a difference. Within 2.5 hours, his search listing went from #10 position to #1 position. My question is this: If this experiment still works today, could you right click, copy link address of the SERP listing from Google's page and put it in a Facebook or Twitter post, and receive the same results? Or would this be gaming the system? Here is an example of the link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiaqZD9-cXLAhUKyWMKHfFID70QFghYMAk&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbuzzy4shots.com%2Ffocus-pain-relief%2F&usg=AFQjCNElHaso_vXP4rWQdsaX1JdP8IItMQ&sig2=Sg9r6zSbW0pZQtb4ZbzJqg&bvm=bv.117218890,d.cGc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tdawson09

0
Still seeing a terrible rank drop after last algo update?!

I'm still stumped as to why the ranking has gone so poor on a whitehat site. (see attached image) As you can see we've steadily been improving the ranking over the last 6+ months and then got hit with a massive change this month... I can't physically see any issues and Moz isn't reporting anything negatively that would have such a major effect.. Like not as if the drops were subtle... they've all gone into the 50+ section! Any insights into what may have changed in the latest algo update would be appreciated?! S0sD7d8.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake74

0
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped

Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH

0
Negative SEO from Spammers Killing Client Rankings

Hi - I have identified a client website which was; a ) hacked and had several fraudulent pages added e.g. www.xxx.com/images/uggaustralia.html added which have 301 redirect links to another fraudulent websites. b) had an auto generated back link campaign (over 12k back links at present) with targeted anchor text at cheap ugg boots, ugg sale etc. I've removed the dodgy redirect web pages and also undertook a link audit using Google WMT, OSE and Seo Majestic and have disavowed all the spammy links at domain level. Consequently my client has dropped from top three for the key phrase to #9. Google WMT now sees ugg boots uk, ugg boots sale etc. as some of the most popular anchor text for the site even though it's blatantly obvious that the site has nothing to do with Ugg boots. No manual webspam penalties are in place however the auto generated anchor text campaign is still ongoing and is generating more spammy links back to non existent web pages - which still Google appears to be picking up. Question is - how long do you reckon it will take for the links to disappear and is there anything I can speed Google along as this issue if not of my making? p.s. For the record I've found at least 500 sites that have been targeted by this same campaign as well.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Door4seo

0
Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why

Hi Mozzers, I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all. Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week. Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected. Suggestions? Advice? Answers? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky

0
Anyone used clicksubmit.co.uk?

As title, anyone used them? their reviews all sound really positive (if they're real). The system sounds like an auto submitting back link generator - which can't be good?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FDFPres

0
Can I report competitor for asking to guest post?

I just had an email from one of my least preferred competitor's SEO company asking about guest posting. They are already totally dominating the SERPs where they have no natural reason for being. Is there anywhere to bring this to the attention of the search engines?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cornwall

0