Reporting Black-Hat SEO to Google, any point?

Well, whilst looking through my keywords, I found a competitor was guilty of:

*Hidden text or links
*Misleading or repeated words

I quickly reported him to Google at: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

I hope this works. Has anyone else done this? How long does it normally take for results to occur, if ever? Will they completely ban the entire site? Maybe try and make contact with the site owner first? Thanks for any help. Never been so happy to be a snitch

 

It takes a years sometimes... Many of my competitors love the spam, I've got a additionaly work with reporting them day by day ;-)

 

what you should do is write down what your competitor is doing on a peice of paper, then flush it down the toilet, but make sure to flush twice because its a long way to the googleplex

 

Nonsense, ferret.

Blitz, I think you should definitely report violations of Google guidelines using the spam report. It's one way of helping to clean out the crap.

Don't expect that this will result necessarily in getting a competitor banned or in having that competitor dropped any time soon in the rankings, although depending on the violation that is one possible outcome. It's more likely that the information will be used to try to improve the Google algorithm to programmatically penalize such tactics.

 

I think it does work indirectly. If G gets lots of reports of hidden text all using the same technique, they can create a filter for it. Then all sites using that method are penalized en masse.

I used to have a competitor that used extensive hidden links and hundreds of subdomains all cross-linked. Sometimes that site would show up in one third of the top one hundred SERPs due to the subdomains not being considered the same site.

That site has been pretty much wiped from Google now.

 

Please, all that will probably do it make you feel better

 

I'm with Ferrett...

Why help google any more than needed?

 

Well, realistically it only takes under a minute. It also penalises a competitor. It doesn't really matter too much if it takes 24 hours, or 6 months.

 

have you ever experienced it working?

 

Never tested it, hence the original question.

If I bothered to sign up to DMOZ which could take years, why not try messing up a competitor, even if it takes years?

 

Haha - I like your style

/offtopic

I've never got it to work - But I stopped trying to report competitors a couple of years ago - I just think It's too harsh.

 

Too harsh? I'd gladly kidnap my competitors children, and throw them off buildings if I feel it would help my SERPs.

(just kidding)

But seriously, if my competitors are breaking the rules and are therefore earning more brownie points with Google unfairly, I don't see anything harsh in reporting it.

 

ok now you can't tell me that Google is going thru those 1 by 1. What do you think they do? Run the urls thru some different programs to narrow down the ones most likely being a problem? I think that about 1 in 10 submissions are really valid. I think that the spam report is most likely being abused by seos, webmasters and whoever hates a site for other reasons than actually the site being in violations of something.

 

Well blitz

if filing out spam reports make you feel better by all means but I don't do it for a variety of reasons

1) I think the whole mentality of trying to rise to the top by some how eliminating the people above you seems sort of flawed

2) I think they rarely do anything

3) I earn more money by looking at the spammers on top and duplicating what they do, then I do reporting them

4) I am not a google employee, so I don't volenteer my time to help them, If someone wanted to give me paycheck for reporting spam then maybe I would do it.

 

If someone's cheating to unfairly gain a higher SERP, why shouldn't I report it? Maybe put it in a different context, if someone's in your class and cheating during a test where only a certain amount of people can get the job, you're telling me you would let them cheat, and then miss out on getting the job? Especially when you think about how I'm losing money to someone because he's cheating, I think it's worth it. I'm not going to sit back and them him do that while I do nothing to prevent it.

We thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they don't show up in search results at all.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

 

One thing I need to say is that coming from a few niche forums (such as real estate related ones), I see a lot of posts saying "look what my competitor is doing". Most of the complaints are about things so minor, you get mad wasting the 2 minutes to even read thru that.

If you want to report someone and feel like it's the right thing to do, do it.
I just don't share the idealism behind that Google feature.

I think it's more or less to keep people busy instead of complaining about the SERPs. And for overanxious seos, this feature must be like a treadmill going 80 miles an hour for a hamster

 

I've recently found someone just scraped my site and only changed few pictures and probably adsense codes.
So I just reported it to google through the adsense link.
And then I sent the webmaster a simple email with something like:

And this worked great. I dodn't know if any google rep saw the site, but short time after I received an email from the site owner that they've removed all the content and they are sorry ..

This is how it works heh

 

So public requests for feedback and spam and black hat reporting from people like Matt Cutts is all just hype, right?

Because it helps weed the crap and black hat SEO out of the index. I understand why this topic might make you nervous, SEbasic. You make your own choices about what is acceptable SEO and what isn't. But if you choose to live on the edge of or outside the rules, you accept the consequences of that decision.

That's ludicrous. But to be honest the part that most amazes me in that statement is the part where you say "I think"

 

You'd be surprised at how much more my WH sites make than my BH sites.

I also don't feel that the majority of BH stuff that is pointed out will have any reflection on how my sites perform...

They're pretty well built and aren't often de-indexed

 

I think you're living in a dreamworld. The majority of submissions will be self serving and irrational attempts to move competitors away by any means necessary.