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
-
At scale way to check content in google?
Is there any tools people know about where I can verify that Google is seeing all of our content at scale. I know I can take snippets and plug them into Google to see if we are showing up, but this is very time consuming and want to know across a bulk of pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
How often is google pushing data ?
Hello, I know that google index quickly but how often is the data pushed into their search results ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Breadcrumbs not displaying on Google
Hello, We have set breadcrumbs on some of our pages (example: https://www.globecar.com/en/car-rental/locations/canada/qc/montreal/airport-yul) for testing purposes and for some reasons they are still not showing up on Google: http://screencast.com/t/BSHQqkP69r6F Yet when I test the page with Google Structured Data Testing tool all is good: http://screencast.com/t/Fzlz3zae Any ideas? Thanks, Karim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeCar0 -
Google is not indexing an updated website
We just relaunched a website that has 5 years old, we maintain all the old URLs and articles but for some reason google is not picking up the new website https://www.navisyachts.com. In Google Webmaster Tools we can see the sitemap with over 1000 pages submitted but shows nothing as indexed. The site is loosing traffic rapidly and positions, from the SEO side all looks fine for me. What can be wrong? I’ll appreciate any help. The new website is built over Joomla 3.4, we have it here at MOZ and other than some minor details it doesn't show that something can be wrong with the website. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FWC_SEO0 -
Google is not honoring my descriptions
I finally got our title tags honored and now Google is just making the descriptions whatever it wants. This is happening on pretty much every one of our pages. An example: http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/plan-explorer/sql-server-query-view SERPS = SQL Server MVP Aaron Bertrand shares a demo kit for Plan Explorer to give you better insight into the advantages of the tool, and to help you share its virtues ... Description tag = SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a free query plan analysis tool that will allow you to find the most expensive operators by CPU, I/O, or both. I can see the description tag when I view source so I know that it is pulling it from the table correctly. What can I do to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools reporting a massive increase in 404s?
Several weeks back, we launched a new website, replacing a legacy system moving it to a new server. With the site transition, webroke some of the old URLs, but it didn't seem to be too much concern. We blocked ones I knew should be blocked in robots.txt, 301 redirected as much duplicate data and used canonical tags as far as I could (which is still an ongoing process), and simply returned 404 for any others that should have never really been there. For the last months, I've been monitoring the 404s Google reports in Web Master Tootls (WMT) and while we had a few hundred due to the gradual removal duplicate data, I wasn't too concerned. I've been generating updated sitemaps for Google multiple times a week with any updated URLs. Then WMT started to report a massive increase in 404s, somewhere around 25,000 404s per day (making it impossible for me to keep up). The sitemap.xml has new URL only but it seems that Google still uses the old sitemap from before the launch. The reported sources of 404s (in WMT) don't exist anylonger. They all are coming from the old site. I attached a screenshot showing the drastic increase in 404s. What could possibly cause this problem? wmt-massive-404s.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sonetseo0 -
Domain Favoured by Google
Hi there, We have just launched our website in Ireland .ie and was wondering would the .ie website be favoured by Google over a competitor with a .co.uk or .com domain? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Will Google Revisit a 403 Page
Hi, We've got some pretty strict anti-scraping logic in our website, and it seems we accidentally snared a Googlebot with it. About 100 URL requests were responded to with a 403 Forbidden error. The logic has since been updated, so this should not happen again. I was just wondering if/when Googlebot will come back and try those URLs again. They are linked from other pages on the site, and they are also in our sitemap. Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0