Should black-hat SEO be reported to Google, Yahoo!..?
Posted by Henrik Madsen on September 9, 2008
Following my recent post about leading web design firms using black-hat SEO to elevate their search rankings, the question is: Should black-hatters be reported to Google and Yahoo!?
The three agencies involved (all of which offer search engine optimization services) are essentially hiding keyword-stuffed elements on their homepages - headlines, semantic links and blocks of text that are deliberately made invisible to all but search engines.
One of the them even uses the same hidden text “trick” on several of their clients’ websites.
According to Google’s quality guidelines:
“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”
Yahoo! says:
“Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called “spam.” Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index.”
Intentional or accidental?
There is of course the question of intent. My personal take is that I’d find it hard to justify as accidental, or innocent, writing specific css that sets the display of keyword-stuffed elements to ‘none’.
Or, as in the case of one of the three, writing inline styles that sets the visibility of two lengthy headlines to ‘hidden’ and that specifies a font-color that’s exactly the same as the page background.
Does this kind of shady SEO work?
With on-site SEO these days playing a less significant role in search ranking (versus inbound link-building) it is virtually impossible to tell. All I can point out is that the three websites I refer to all rank high on page 1 results at Google - for very generic, highly searched phrases. Search terms that are, seemingly purposely, hidden on their homepages.
So what do you think? Should black-hat SEO generally be reported?
Both Google and Yahoo! encourage reporting on the basis it will ultimately help them improve search results. But what’s your opinion?
Filed Under Hints & Tips, Search Engine Optimization, Website Design
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I think the Google algorithms are already designed to detect black hatters … so its better to leave it up to them to find them.
As for us, reporting them could be considered helping Google, etc but you can never be too sure if those are actually bots who are spamming or if they are genuine comments from people.
So unless you are absolutely sure, don’t think you should.
All is fair in love and war. If your competition is breaking the rules, you would be crazy not to file a spam report.
Just don’t expect Google to actually act on your spam report.
They should be reported since their existance degrades the quality of a product which we all rely on to help us out in regards to finding things. So unless you don’t use search engines yourself in your daily work and don’t think they carry any value you have a moral obligation to report these buggers to Google and Yahoo.
Black hat SEO SUCKS!
I was under the (possibly naive) assumption that Google was smart enough to pick this stuff up? It’s not that difficult for them to parse the CSS and worl out if stuff is hidden, and there was a high profile case where BMW was blacklisted because the content Google got was different to what the public got.
Of course I could (and probably are) wrong. In which case report ‘em - it’s tricks like this that stuffs up the web for everyone else, and reeks of laziness.
Yes they absolutely should be reported.
i think they should be if they are really pushing the line… i understand how a number of top 10 firms are getting their ranking result, and often my clients really think that i should copy their lead…
im just not sure how quickly google will respond to general submissions. I think YAS Linker is a bit of a con that a number of large companies use, i know google quickly remove any of these results…
Reort. In theory, Google should be able to find these, but…
I think that you should indeed report spam to google.
The search engines have their own agenda and guess what, it’s not delivering the best possible search results. Their number one priority is making money.
Google subsidizes a lot of the spam through Adsense. There are really no quality controls there, Google will pay anyone sending them clicks. They will also allow anyone to promote shady products and scams through Adwords.
If you dare make money by selling links and don’t let Google know (by using nofollow or otherwise), then you are a manipulator of search results. You are a spammer. Anyway, you can report to Google or not. It won’t make much of a difference and you will be wasting your time. Unless of course you are just reporting your competitors. Oh hey, welcome to the “dark” side.
Depends how spammy the site trying to rank highly is. If it’s of no use to anyone: then surely it’s worth reporting.
I guess theoretically you should report the website if you are certain that they are using black hat / spam techniques, but ethically should you contact the webmaster of the site first in case it is a genuine mistake?
If Google does take action and get the site penalised, it could be 3 months or more before they start to get indexed again. Ask yourself why you are reporting them - because they are deliberately trying to deceive the search engines or because it means you can eliminate some of the competition?