Picture this…
You have great Search Engine rankings for the majority of phrases you’re interested in being found for, then you start to notice a slip in your Google positioning, you follow the decline of your site in Google’s rankings for a few days and notice that there are 3 domains that continue to show up at the top of Google’s results – where your site USED to be.
You haven’t done anything “illegal” to your site that would cause it to start showing up lower in the SERPs. You check your robots.txt file and that hasn’t changed – the Search Engine’s are still crawling the site.
You haven’t signed up for any link farms or gained 1000 links overnight – so that’s not it!
You decide to research the 3 domains that started outranking your site & you find:
1. these 3 domains are registered to the same person…interesting
2. there are over 100 domains registered to this person…hmmm, that’s strange
3. each site is a direct duplicate of each other, the only difference is the change in the excessive amount of keywords used…oh boy
4. when you search your company name in Google, the spam sites are ranking using your meta-tags and copy from the site...what the hell?
5. this 1 competitor is implementing the following spam/unethical SEO techniques that are prohibited by Google on over 100 domains:
- image based text
- multiple domains with identical content
- overuse of keywords
- use of deceptive & misleading links
- spammy URL structure
Let’s handle the spam issue first, I’ve addressed the #4 issue (copyright infringement) from above in another post – So now what?
You make sure that Google knows about this – what’s the easiest and best way to do this? Matt Cutts (Engineer at Google) tells us to submit the site to Google’s spam report. I’m sure this works for some people, in this case, it didn’t! We submitted the sites we found most often in Google’s results to the online spam report form…it’s been 3 months, we’re still waiting.
Next, we put together documentation on some of the over 100 domains that are implementing the blackhat SEO tactics (including whois data, examples of the blackhat offenses, list of 108 domains, etc) and sent a nice PowerPoint to: spamreport@google.com – once on February 1st, 2008 and a second time on May 7th, 2008.
A few things have improved (ie: the exact offensive inside URLs are gone); however, the domains continue to rank in Google for high traffic phrases. Do the pages within this site look the same to you?
www.ocf.com/account_receivable_loan.htm
www.ocf.com/factoring_account_receivables.htm
www.ocf.com/factoring_government_vendor.htm
www.ocf.com/factoring_history.htm
www.ocf.com/factoring_loan.htm
www.ocf.com/factoring-account-receivables-article.htm
www.ocf.com/invoice_factoring_rate.htm
www.ocf.com/invoice-factoring-company/invoice/Factoring-Healthcare-Staffing-company-invoice-factoring-company.htm
www.ocf.com/receivables-factoring-article.htm
Do these look familiar?
www.businessreceivablefactoring.net
www.factoring-services.org
www.invoicefactoringcompanies.org
www.medicalstaffingagency.org
www.occfactor.com
www.professionalstaffing.org
www.recruitmentandstaffing.org
www.sdcf.com/factoringbenefits.htm
www.sellingaccountsreceivable.com
www.staffingorganization.org
What we would hope would happen is that Google takes action by no longer indexing & ranking these spammy domains in order to offer a better experience for their users.
