For the past 72 hours I have been doing a very involved competitive analysis for a client of mine. My client sells niche nutritional products on his online store. Basically my client wanted to improve his rankings in the google, so my initial idea was to see what the competition was doing. What I discovered is a startling eye opener. What I have concluded there are about 50 websites selling the same type of products as my client. I visited each site making notes what they were selling and so on. I soon found that many of the sites had the same phone number to call and it became apparent that websites have the same product lines. The template changed along with the headers and footers, but the content was all the same which consisted of the same items for sale. I found 3 main abusers of using this methodology. Website site 1 had 21 affiliate websites (6@PR4, 15@PR3), Website 2 had 18 affiliate websites (1@PR6, 5@PR5, 4@PR4, 3@PR3, 3@PR2, 2@PR0) and website 3 had 12 affiliate websites (3@PR4, 9@PR3). My Client site is currently at PR5. My question to the community is it worth to report this spam to Google? Maybe I am too much old school but I believe focusing on one website and strengthen the brand of that website, but maybe shotgun approach is the wave of the future? Is it worth the effort to report this spam to Google? In addition I would be interested in hearing the pros and cons of this type of SEO, and any stories that you have to share. 1/7 PS I am indebted to Copyscape for helping me with this research: http://www.copyscape.com
I'm not sure that Google would actually be interested in something like that. If a single company has multiple websites, should they lose ranking? Probably not. If all of the sites are effectively equivalent, but not identical? Interesting question... A shotgun approach could be very effective if you can make every site on the front page of SERPs one of your sites. That is very anti-competitive, but I'm not sure there's precedent for Google acting against that.
I kinda have to agree with Rob here... I mean to profit by attacking someone elses company is wrong.. they are trying to make it just like any of us. I mean if you are a decent SEO person and want to beat him by working harder and getting ahead using your talents and more resources that is one thing ..
Spend time creating new content. Unless you are a Google employee... Golly, why donate time to a high-margin commercial enterprise? Use that time for yourself!
Nope. Besides, today's spam will be tomorrow's legit SEO. Just keep feeding the SEs what they want and improve the rank of your own sites.