Reporting Webspam to Google
-
We are in ecommerce, and there are a few review sites that are dominating the rankings for our products. The sites are very good - very well written content (2000+ words) and visually appealing sites. The 2 main culprits are clearly black hat. One site's backlinks are pure spam, and the other is buying footer and sidebar links.
Will ratting them to Google have any impact? If not, any suggestions on how to compete? Our competing pages are product descriptions, and creating a 2000 word product description seems inappropriate. Also, all of these products are brand new, and due to extensive media spends, the search volume is very high. Since they are beating us to the punch by getting good content posted first, they are proving difficult to displace.
-
This is a touchy ethical question for SEOs. I think there are some questions you should ask yourself.
First, are you sure the company in question placed the links? Is it possible that they were the victim of negative SEO that didn't work?
Second, do you actually deserve to out rank them? Is your content truly better? Do people want your result more than theirs?
If you can answer yes to both of these, then I think you can feel comfortable in moving forward with a spam complaint. If not, you risk either kicking someone while they are down, or hurting user experience overall - neither of which are particularly ethical.
-
Will ratting them to Google have any impact?
Yes, but probably not in the way you're hoping. It's pretty rare for Google to take manual action against a specific site just because someone reports it. They've stated in the past that they prefer to solve the issue algorithmically than on a one-off basis, so it can take awhile for the algo to catch up to what bad actors are doing.
If not, any suggestions on how to compete?
Make your site the best resource using white hat tactics and be patient.
-
Hi,
If the site is using spam techniques to rank in google, You can file a spam report at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Dates on Google Search Results
Hello, I manage htts://globalrose.com When I search on Google for "Yellow Roses", "Yellow Roses Globalrose", or any search that might bring up one of our pages, sometimes our search results appear with dates right before the description. Does anyone know what this mean? Why they appear on some and not other pages? Here is a search result for example: Example Google Search Can someone please help clarify this for us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalrose.com0 -
Google Indexing Stopped
Hello Team, A month ago, Google was indexing more than 2,35,000 pages, now has reduced to 11K. I have cross-checked almost everything including content, backlinks and schemas. Everything is looking fine, except the server response time, being a heavy website, or may be due to server issues, the website has an average loading time of 4 secs. Also, I would like to mention that I have been using same server since I have started working on the website, and as said above a month ago the indexing rate was more than 2.3 M, now reduced to 11K. nothing changed. As I have tried my level best on doing research for the same, so please if you had any such experiences, do share your valuable solutions to this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreyjohnson0 -
AngularJS - How does Google go?
We're rebuilding our entire website in angularJS. We've got it rendering fine in WMT, but does that mean that it's content is detectable? I've looked into prerender.io and that seems like a great solution to the problem of not seeing any static HTML, but is it really necessary? I'm looking into this as I'm having the argument currently with my devs, and they're all certain that Google renders angularJS fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | localdirectories0 -
Something unintelligible in google search results.
In the last month i see something that i can't explain, from nowhere the first search result for the keyword Name Necklace is an Etsy shop, (I attach an image). I try to find out why google gives this online shop the first position and i have no idea why is that. Please, any suggestions? mnbAIrY.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm0 -
DMCA Complaint to Google - HELP
I have several sites copying my content, which I found out via Copyscape.com. Unfortunately, this is giving me duplicate content. I filed a DMCA complaint through Google and the infringing pages were approved but the pages still remain. Can someone please help me understand this better? I thought Google was supposed to remove these pages? Am I supposed to content the site owner to get the content removed or are their pages simply de-indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tutugirl0 -
My homepage dropped off of Google today? Any ideas?
My site, www.leaffilter.com, previously ranked #1 for searches of "leaffilter" and "leaf filter". Today the #1 ranking for "leaffilter" with Google is gone. Well, it's not gone on all internet connection. At home the #1 ranking is in place. At the office computer it is not anywhere near page 1. I'm testing searches logged in, not logged in, cache and cookies cleared, different browsers. Other, secondary pages, are appearing on page 1. It looks as if the homepage is just no longer indexed...but not on all internet connection. Any ideas what is happening? Does anyone have any troubleshooting tips?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LF_digital0 -
Google Adsense Good for SEO?
Is there any merit to the statement that Google will give some SEO value to sites that display Adsense? Or is there absolutely no SEO value for or against a site that displays Adsense Ads? Clearly, it would benefit Google's finance to give at least a small boost to sites that display Adsense, but do they do it? My guess is no, but I'm wondering ...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold0 -
Getting rid of a site in Google
Hi, I have two sites, lets call them site A and site B, both are sub domains of the same root domain. Because of a server config error, both got indexed by Google. Google reports millions of inbound links from Site B to Site A I want to get rid of Site B, because its duplicate content. First I tried to remove the site from webmaster tools, and blocking all content in the robots.txt for site B, this removed all content from the search results, but the links from site B to site A still stayed in place, and increased (even after 2 months) I also tried to change all the pages on Site B to 404 pages, but this did not work either I then removed the blocks, cleaned up the robots.txt and changed the server config on Site B so that everything redirects (301) to a landing page for Site B. But still the links in Webmaster Tools to site A from Site B is on the increase. What do you think is the best way to delete a site from google and to delete all the links it had to other sites so that there is NO history of this site? It seems that when you block it with robots.txt, the links and juice does not disappear, but only the blocked by robots.txt report on WMT increases Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JacoRoux0