Problems with link spam from spam blogs to competitor sites

[RodneyRiley]

A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market.

My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!).

This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty.

Ideas? Thoughts?

All help appreciated

[asimahme]

I have dealt with a competitor like this and have recently finally climbed ahead of them in the SERPS for our keyword.  Unfortunately if you send a spam report to Google that this website is getting spammy links, they will probably put your message in the trash bin.  Don't ask me why, someone bascially told me this and after my experiences with complaining to Google about so and so doing naughty things online, I haven't seen any action taken.

Except for one time, but that's because we were in a large market and this particular website jumped from number 20 to number 1 in less than 10 days.

The way I have combated these link spammers is buy figuring out how they are getting the links and where they are getting the links from and try to mimic them in the most white hat way possible (which leads to some gray hat tactics).

Forexample, one of our competitors were getting many many blog links from the home pages.  So we decided to create a widget and literally sponsored the widget on their home page (this really isn't white hat, but it's close enough).  We have done the same with Infographics, and buying guest posts.

Also we stayed away from any website that screams out spam or irrelevant to our websites we were working on.

I personally wouldn't jump into the spamming methods your competitors are doing simply because you never know is Google's Panda decides to take steroids one day and ruin your website over night like many websites have been ruined from the first couple Panda updates.

Play fair and beware of Google and the dirty tricks they don't like.

Hope this helps

[Trupanion]

Are you sure that those spammy links are what is helping them rank?

I wouldn't drop to their level, but focus on white hat marketing.  And if you want links, create a new campaign targeted on building solid relationships for the good links.

It may not be right now, but Google is slowly rewarding better content sites.

[asimahme]

Agreed!

[milancole]

Ditto. I am facing a competitor who is similarly succeeding by using comment spam tactics. It seems fairly certain to me that Google is giving some value to these links even though most of them are no-followed. I suspect that at some future date they may get better at devaluing them or penalizing for them, however, at present comment spamming seems to be an advantageous tactic.