How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?

[kevin1]

A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry.

They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors.

It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.

[KeriMorgret]

Kevin, can you give us any type of update as to how this turned out? Did the rankings drop back after a bit, or are they still there? Did you figure out if they were using any shady tactics?

[NextDigital51]

There are a lot of analysis you need to do to find out whether a person is doing BH on their site (just like NY Times hiring a SEO company to research on JC Penny) as there are a lot of plays you can play around with to try and trick Google.

Just some examples:

Onsite

• Are they stuffing keywords?
• Are they using doorway pages?

Offpage

• Are they buying links?(Most common)
• Are they spamming blog comments?

At the end of the day, if you find out that they are actually using BH method, you can report them from Google Webmaster Tools, make sure you put in all your evidence as they would not spend the time analyising each request.

[UPform5]

Hi Kevin,

It is really hard to assume that a website is using BH unless I am able to check them myself, but for starters (which I believe you already did) you can always check the FF: PR, Links (inbound & outbound) use yahoo for this, use the tools in SEOmoz for this too to determine the quality of links.

You see it could also mean that those websites are of diff. IP's and each site is linking to authority domains, needless to say but you also have to check your website if it is really optimized and the duration thereof for its caching.

Now this is a handful but I am excited as to the outcome of this.

Cheers!