I'm Being Outranked by a Spammer - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Kenny Martin

What do you do when you are being outranked by a spammer? It's one of the most frustrating things that an SEO can face, but before jumping to conclusions it's important to understand what exactly is happening.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives us helpful advice with many important steps to follow if you discover that a spammer is outranking you. Let us know your thoughts on this challenging problem in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a very tough problem, being outranked by spammers.

What I mean very specifically here is link spammers, because it is rare in the SEO world that today you are seeing other sorts of spam. Cloaking, manipulative redirection, doorway pages, they happen a little bit, but they are much less common. The most common forms of spam and the thing that I see people complain about all the time, the thing I get emails about, I get tweets about, we get Q&A about is, "Hey, Rand, I am being outranked by these spammers. Can you send this over to the Google webspam team? Can you tell the Bing webspam team? Who should I email over there? I filed my webspam reports. Do you think I should try and get it published on YOUmoz? Should I try and write to The New York Times and have them write about it because it seems like Google kicks people out when they're written about in The New York Times, at least for a little while?"

These are not always great tactics unfortunately, but I do want to walk you through some things that you should be doing when you think you are being outranked by spammers.

The first part is make sure, make 100% sure, that what you are looking at is really a ranking that's been earned through link spam. What I am talking about here is I will take you back. I will tell you a story of several years ago. This was probably, I am going to say 2007, and I was in the audience, I can't remember if I was on the panel or in the audience, and there was Google's head of webspam, has been for the last decade or so, Matt Cutts, on the panel. Matt was looking at some links using his special Google software where he is investigating a link graph right on his laptop, and someone from the audience had said, "Hey, Matt, I am getting outranked by this particular spammer." He looked and said, "No, you know, we see a few thousands links to that site, but we're actually only counting a few hundred of them, and they're the ones that are making it rank there."

So, think about that. We're talking about thousands of links pointing to a site. Think of all the links that might be pointing to a site here. Here are five different links that are pointing to this particular page. What the webspam team at Google is essentially saying is, "Hey, you know what? We know that this and this and this and this are spam. The reason that this page is ranking is because they do have some good links that we are counting." Remember it is often the case that Google's webspam team and their algorithm will not make these links cause a penalty against you, because then you could just point them at somebody else's site or page and make them drop in the rankings. Instead, what they'll do is drop the value of those, so that essentially it is like having a no-followed link for those pages. Yes, it's a followed link, but they are going to essentially say, "Oh, you know what? Our algorithm has detected that those are manipulative links. We are going to remove the value that they pass."

A lot of the times when you look through a list of hundreds or thousands of links and you see a lot of spam and you think to yourself, "Hey, that's why that guy is ranking. It's because he is spamming." It might not be the case. It could even be the case that person didn't act