What if my competitor is cheating at SEO?

It's a question that comes up all the time, but there hasn't been a good answer to it. There are painstaking ways that you can analyze your competitor's Web site for signs of elementary cheating, such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, and other simple forms of search spam, but don't bother. The search engines do a reasonably good job of sniffing those out themselves nowadays. But what about the big time search spammer? What about someone who has set up an elaborate network of linking sites all designed to rank his site higher and your site lower? How can you catch someone like that in the act of cheating at SEO? If it is your competitor engaging in such tricks, it is a burning question.

My friend Ted Ulle pointed me to an announcement last month that might help answer that question, where a partnership was announced between search tool vendor BrightEdge and the search engine blekko to combat search spam.
no spam!

Image via Wikipedia

Not many details emerged from that press release, so we'll have to wait and see if this is real progress, but it is a start. I can think of several things that such a tool might be able to do:

* Identify link farms. If blekko can use link analysis techniques to spot unusual link patterns coming from sites that don't make sense, they can alert you as to what your competitor is doing. They might not be able to algorithmically detect a sure spamming incident, but they might be able to identify something for you to analyze on your own.
* Identify paid link manipulation. Just as with link farms, competitors who buy links masquerading as free links violate the search engines' rules and are benefiting from higher rankings if undiscovered. If blekko can clue you in to suspicious patterns, you might find that where there is smoke, there is fire.
* Uncovering negative SEO. You might be guessing that the search engines themselves work very hard to uncover the first two abuses, which leads to an even more insidious trick. What if your competitor is setting up these spammy techniques, but pointing them at your site to get you penalized? It happens, and blekko might be able to uncover suspicious patterns to alert you.

If you're thinking to yourself, don't Google and Bing try to catch all of these things? Yes, they do. But they are doing it with algorithms only—the cases that are most egregious are the only ones that get spit out for human analysts to review. They can't look at everything and the algorithms are not foolproof. If blekko's algorithms are any good, the human analysis of these possible spam problems can be "outsourced" to people willing to do it for free.

It is yet to be seen exactly what BrightEdge has implemented here and just how magical the blekko algorithms are at uncovering search shenanigans. And it isn't clear how Google and Bing will respond when provided reports on bad behavior. It's possible that they will take them seriously and investigate, but it's equally likely that so many bogus reports could be generated by people using such a tool that they will be largely ignored. You can imagine a situation where anyone runs a check and then send whatever is spit out to Google, rather than using that as a jumping off point for real investigation.

If we marketers use these tools to cry wolf, don't be surprised if Google and Bing quickly ignore our cries. That would be a real shame, to me, because I think this is a great idea. It's the social approach to spam. Give people the tools to police their competitors and there is a more level playing field for everyone.

Regardless, I will be quite interested in what is delivered here. I'd love it if those who start using the tool would post their experiences here. And if anyone has deeper information than the intriguing press release, please post that, too. I can't help but think that this is a new front in the war on spam that Google and Bing overlooked: crowdsourcing. We'll see if it works.

in reference to: What if my competitor is cheating at SEO? (view on Google Sidewiki)