On Tuesday, Google’s Vanessa Fox announced that you can now report paid links directly from your Webmaster Tools dashboard. For the most part, I try not to pay much attention to the seedier behavior of my competitors, but this announcement got me thinking again.

The dilemma

I’m trying to rank my company’s website for a competitive keyword phrase. According to many search engine gurus, I should try to get links from websites that already rank well for this keyword phrase. Since many of those websites are my direct competitors, my opportunities in this arena are pretty slim.

However, the website in the number-one spot is a shopping portal. They don’t actually sell products … they sell advertising for companies like mine. They’re also a bunch of dirty spamgoblins. Here a few examples I found just on the home page:

• Very light gray (#DFDFDF) keyword-stuffed links on a white background at the very top of the page.
• More keywords stuffed into HTML comment tags.
• More keywords stuffed into file and directory names (”…blue-widgets-red-widgets/buy-widgets/sell-widgets.jpg” alt=”Did I mention widgets?”).
• Links that look exactly like the surrounding non-linked text and don’t change appearance on mouseover.
• Even more keywords stuffed into link title tags and CSS id tags.

But the best example comes straight from an e-mail I received from one their salespeople:

If you are interested in direct links for organic search … please call me.

And while not it’s technically spammy, it’s a little slimy to offer “optimizing every product that you put on our sight [sic] (each product will come up on page one on Google).” Guaranteeing page one Google results is classic snake oil salesmanship in the SEO field.

So many questions

Should I report them for spam? Should I report them for selling organic links? Should I just keep my nose to the grindstone and stop worrying about their shady techniques?

These questions keep running through my mind, but they’re a lot easier to deal with than the next set of questions:

Should I start stuffing keywords into my own pages? Should I buy their organic links? What’s the point of being a white-hat SEO when the spamgoblins are clearly not getting caught?

What would you do (that you’ll admit to)?

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