Mild-mannered webmaster by day …
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.
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:
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.
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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5 Responses for "If you can’t beat ‘em, report ‘em … or join ‘em"
I’ve always been of the opinion that you have to look yourself in the mirror. Long ago, I decided that if I couldn’t explain it to my mother with a straight face and no guilty conscience, I simply wasn’t going to do it. I think that in the long-term - search engines will continue to improve - meaning that these black-hat methods will only work until search engines figure it out - and if you’ll recall, so many of the older tricks no longer work. Honesty is still the best policy. (and you sleep well at night too!)
I don’t report them, like the previous commenter said: eventually it will catch up with them. Also I think that paid links are natural and were going on before it made a difference- Some called it (wait for it) ADVERTISING! It’s googles job to algorithmically figure out what is relevant advertising instead of asking you to do it for them. The acronym for SPAM is:
S ites
P ostitioned
A bove
M ine
So I am sure plenty of people will be doing reporting.
It won’t be me. That being said I think it is wrong to buy totally irrelevant paid links, but Google already said that they can spot those easily, so why ask us to police this?
Look in the mirror?
It isn’t like they are kicking puppies or beating the homeless here.
Melodramatic just a bit I think.
I see these paid links as I see the link exchanges. The moment people realized this is a good way to “fool” Google, they started with: “Hello, My name is x. I would like to propose a link exchange with your site about y product. I have already placed the link. Thank you in advance.”
Do you think most of these people ask for exchanges (normally with a better positioned site) because they are already filled with eternal love for that site? Or did the 3 way link exchanges come up because we just wanted to play?
Let’s be serious. Some exchange links, some pay for them, others just wish they were invited to the “game”. And as long as Google knows to show me SPAM sites (really spammy sites), MFAs and all kinds of crap in the first results I assume it’s not my problem anymore. Not to mention the pleasure when you find your unique article stolen by a splog and weird enough it shows BEFORE you. I assume Google needs to work a tad on that famous algorithm. And these are issues more important than a link. When the stolen content fares better than my article that was posted BEFORE, we do have some issues
Love your blog, anyway .. thank you for a good read
I think that the webmaster tools are terrific, and think that reporting links is a great new feature..
Trouble is - I have a hard time clicking the “Thumbs Up” button for Stumbleupon.. So theres little to no chance that I will report a link
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