What can I do if a competitor is spamming?

On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video.

Laura Thieme from Columbus, OH asked:

A client has a leading competitor who has created 100 or so blog sites with little depth - Google gives them a top ranking on every related term to their industry. Why does this tactic still win? I thought this was crap hat tactics?

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• spam
• competitor

[havock83]

I have a competitor with several thousands crap pages designed only for spamming, and another with 10 duplicated sites with the very same content. Since last year I have already made several reports without results.

Webmasters can do genuine mistakes. So I understand why some spam get no results.

But some people clearly try to cheat with stupid tricks.

You'll tell me "send a report", but what for ? If you don't do anything it's not worth the time.

[Polyron]

"he's just annoyed when people do like spammy, junky stuff that doesn't really help anybody on the web".

Yeah sum out 99.9999% of the results I get from google when searching

[WhiteShadow2k1]

Whenever I search something on Google, I never have to go further than the first page to find it. Where is the spam?

[50kT]

this just goes to WHY people are using crap hat tactics. CUZ THEY WORK AND DELIVER RESULTS

unfortunately for the rest of us who don't want to use crap hat

[RemusLt]

About 50 percent of the results I am getting on google are one or another way manipulated.

[rk17081]

Hello Matt, your spam report program don't work at all, I sent a same spam report 3 times and also asked my friends to send the same, 2 of my friends also send the same spam report but there is no response or action taken from your side, The still ranks higher as compared to mine.

[prodigaljoe]

Unfortunately this is just a part of the business. You just need to find ways to outrank them.

[LowCostVideo]

unfortunately, google cannot catch every instance spammy black hat tactics, so the truth of the matter is that spammy black hat and crap hat tactics still work, and work very well....

until you get caught.

so the risk of using effective black hat tactics is that if you get caught and google slaps you, then all your black hat / hard work is wasted. but your chances of getting caught are slim. some may disagree.

[e2kkot]

Like someone actually checks them :) I'm sure Google gets a few million of those finger pointing reports per day, who is gonna check them and adjust the rankings? Waste of time

[xspazio]

I submit spam report about a "competitor" who get 50-80.000 from google/day and use spam, hidden text in any pages, clonate his site in other 4-5 domain and then link from his site the "clone" and so on... and this is only the stuff visible from "outside" i really can't imagine what other things him do...

Google penalize some of his key (lost 1-2 position, anyway is still in first page for all keyword)... is more of 1,5 year that domain is in serp and receive more traffic