Recently Matt Cutts has announced on his blog that Google will now be letting companies report other websites that might be taking spammy approaches and clearly violating the Google webmaster guidelines! Is Google running out of abilities to track all black hat techniques?
If someone comes across another website performing any spammy or black hat SEO techniques such as cloaking, hidden text, misleading words or deceptive redirects you can now submit the websites information to the following link:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
Am I the only one that sees a variety of problems from this? Trying to create silent police officers in the search engine optimization industry is an appetite for disaster while the potential for rather large quarrels is amazing. This leads me to believe that the spam in the search engines is really starting to reach an unprecedented amount which justifies how important it really is to market your business online through marketing and not SEO recipes. Who is on the other end making the decision whether the website being reported is actually violating any spam rules? What happens when competitors get vindictive and start to report websites that clearly are not doing anything wrong?
I think Google has the right idea on trying to clean up websites that are just littering the search engines with useless information simply to manipulate search rankings but as soon as you open the doors to the SEO community and allow people play police officers it is only a matter of time before people abuse the heck out of a tool like this. I think something like this is very important though. There are too many businesses out there that really just infiltrate the search engines with complete rubbish that just clutters up everything for the websites that really trying to market and brand themselves the right way online. You see some of the freelance websites where businesses want 500 articles written. What on earth is that going to do for you? How about you write a few really good targeted articles and get them visible on some of your leading industry websites or forums. That will go much further than just trying to dump them all into the search engines hopping that your rankings will all of a sudden shoot through the roof. News flash, search engines are evolving and changing and that approach is seriously not that far away from being a very unimportant attempt in marketing a business or a website online.
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com
