When SEO Competitors Play Unfair? Do We Do the Same, or Report Them, or What?

December 18th, 2008

by Laura M Thieme

It’s the fourth week of my maternity leave. For those of you who don’t know this already, I delivered Melina Francis Thieme on November 24, 2008 via c-section. If you want to read about this, you can but please proceed with caution, as the word “breast” is referenced in terms of “breast-feeding” so if you’re offended by such, please don’t follow this breastfeeding link). I’m checking emails as of this week late at night, but am off until January 2009. Life has changed - and it involves sleep deprivation - like attending an SES week of parties for a month now, with no break in between. The hangover morning after never ends - but the sweet reward of having a child in your life for the first time is amazing. Having waited 40 years for your first child brings an even sweeter change in your life.

At this point, I’m only handling high level issues for clients - and one is a project where a client’s website has slipped out of the top rankings for their two main keyword phrases in Google alone. Yahoo & MSN are in tact, and in fact have improved, but in Google - not so much - they’ve declined since we took on the project. They had been blacklisted in Google when we came on board, but these two terms were intact. Now - not so much. Slowly but surely, other terms have declined - and one has to wonder if the blacklisting from a site hijacking is the issue, or if something else is happening.

For example, their leading SEO competitor tactics include setting up a network of nearly 50 or so websites that are for little purpose other than that of SEO. Why does Google reward this type of action? My client and I play clean SEO, but this competitor does not. So what should we do? Do we do the same, as some of our former clients have asked us to, or do we report them publicly to cause enough pain that Matt Cutts will invariably weigh in on it (as done on www.seomoz.org), or do we beat them at their own game doing something else on the fringe? Preferably, I’d report the buggers publicly - and am considering doing so. The issue though - is why is that the competitor wins with a multitude of fake websites, and my client, who has one clean site does not. Their site was hijacked in March - but is that still the problem, and why can’t Webmaster Tools at Google tell me that I’m penalized?

I caught up with a friend of mine today and he was surprised to hear that we don’t work with SEO projects exclusively anymore. We provide three-in-one SEM services, which include paid search, SEO and website analytics. I told him it was because often our clients’ competitors resort to SEO tactics that we do not support, including setting up a network of websites that are fake, or created for one sole purpose - and that is to garner top five positions in Google for a particular keyword phrase or group of phrases. Clients who paid top dollar often indicated they did not care if we did anything illegal, and in other cases, wondered why their 40-page website did not show up for something really popular such as herbal supplements.

Lastly, after you’ve done all the right SEO things, there gets to be a point where you have no other choice than to build links - and what if building links is a waste of time in general? Can’t we just do paid search and get along? Shouldn’t tracking traffic and making your website better from a conversion perspective be the main focus?

So, let us know what you think? When you see your top competitors playing unfair, and it’s costing you SEO keywords, or possibly even an SEO client - what do you do? Do you report them, play unfair, or beat them at their own game another way?

Posted in Search Optimization (SEO).

 

Related Posts

One Response to “When SEO Competitors Play Unfair? Do We Do the Same, or Report Them, or What?”

  1. St. Louis Programmer Says:
    November 8th, 2009 at 10:13 pm

    There is obviously a lot to know about this, but you did a good job covering it

Leave a Reply