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Mopping Up The Competition: Report Spam
| Written by David A. Farrell | Published 11-30-06 - Updated 01-02-08 | Page 02 of 02 |
Whether you have one or one hundred spam sites between you and your target audience, once your list is complete, it's time to take action. At present, the Google search engine enjoys the largest market share of user queries over all other search companies combined. Hit your illegal competitors there and you take them down big-time, and will continue to do damage long after their site's have been banned and you've forgiven and forgotten about them. Reason being, any website with a high PR and search standing will draw a moderate amount of traffic to its web pages. Even a moderate amount of web traffic reinforces link popularity to and from and throughout a site, while bolstering page visits within its network of affiliates (all positive variables for sustaining said rank and position). Cut that traffic down by some 60 percent (which is roughly the size of Google's market share) and you impact that spam site forever after.
Of course, the good Gods at Google are a fair and just people, and spammers may apply for reinclusion as long as they can prove that they've mended their ways. However, once back in the game, they will then have to compete alongside you rather than behind you and your honest competitors' backs. Hopefully by that time, you will have developed your site's PR and search standings to the point where the prospect of opposition projects a long, tiresome fight to all planning to take you on.
Black Hat Dominoes
If you feel you haven't the time to waste reporting just one or two spam sites out of a hundred, think again. One or two spam sites is all you need to make a hole to the top, especially if that one or two is anywhere near your rank and position, or (say it ain't so) above you in the search standings. Exposing one or two openly deceptive spam sites for black hat tactics usually uncovers a multitude of closet spammers no one knew about or even imagined were in league with the offender(s) –the lure of link trading with high PR websites is that strong. And because many search engines (most famously, Google) penalize websites that link to spammers, you may find (relatively quickly after a site's been banned, in fact) that ten or twenty of your previously honest-looking competitors have mysteriously drop down in (not out of) the running.
Once a spam site is finally investigated (and please be patient with this process, for it does take time), all outbound links to the spammer's affiliates are catalogued and tested; and they be damned if there is an active return link back to the spammer's website from their own. Also, any website crawled independently of a spam investigation in possession of active links to banned sites is also punished. The purported penalty for trading links with a site that gets banned, or even linking to one without reciprocation, is somewhere in the vicinity of a 50 percent slap in PR, or outright banning in kind. If true, that's a hell of a shakedown by anyone's standards and well worth your time, even if it is only one or two bad sites in your field.
Behold, Your Shining Shield And Arms
The following links will navigate you to the spam report pages of some of the most popular search engines on the Internet. And in as much as the articles on our website shall be continuously updated and/or expanded by either myself or other members of our web design and development staff, you may trust that the information found here is both accurate and reliable. Please keep in mind that, as far as we have ascertained, reporting spam websites at any of these locations is completely confidential. And always remember, reporting spam supports and improves the ultimate goal of every search engine, which is only to provide the best of all possible results per user query. It is not their job to police the Internet: It is yours.
Before making use of any of the spam reporting websites listed above, there are two very important points that need to be understood prior to submitting your report. 1) As already mentioned, this process takes time. The impact of your submission may not be felt by the offending website and/or owner for some time. Patience is definitely a virtue during these proceedings. And 2), no one individual has the power to upset the rank and/or status of a particular website based on a single submission. This process is highly democratic. If a website is truly in violation of existing Internet content policies, it is important to ally yourself with other website owners in your field, all of whom should submit reports agains the offending site. The more people submit against a particular site, the more likely that site is to be punished or even banned by search engines.
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