Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Is reporting link schemes to boost our Google SERP page ranks a viable strategy?

Hi, fairly new to SEO (and a long-winded writer) so go easy on me. I've recently been diving head first into SEO for a very large established digital retailer without a lot of direction, so I've been studying a lot to come up with a variety of SEO strategies to pitch, and have been making small changes to products (keyword optimization, building backlinks by reaching out to KOI bloggers with broken links, etc) to track the effect it has on our pageviews and thus sales. I'm hesitant to make big changes or sweeping policies until I know what works.

Recently, I found that some of our competitors were flat-out coping content for products and after some successful sweeps of DCMA takedowns, a bunch of our products climbed on Google due to simply eliminating the visibility of competitors that copied our stuff.

I was impressed by how quickly Google removed and basically nuked those pages from their search, and recently read about Google's policies for link schemes and pagerank manipulation (which i'm coming to understand equates to 'black hat SEO'). A lot of big blogs that rank 1-5 on Google for high volume keywords in our industry clearly have paid relationships with the products and retailers they recommend (shareasale link redirects and mediakits with price points for article link plugs) which seem to be against Google's guidelines for content creation. So my question is:

Can/should I spend time submitting reports to Google for high-traffic blogs that break Google's webmaster guidelines (re: link schemes) to hurt the backlink profiles (and hopefully page authorities) of our competitors?

I don't propose this as the sole focus of our SEO initiatives, but as an additional aspect to our strategy. Also if this is a common SEO strategy and reporting it is super scummy, I'd like to know. I'm still a lil' unsure of how this community views white and black hat strategies, since both seem pretty popular.

If it is relevant or helps, the keywords we're competing for have a range of 5k-110k monthly volume, and we rank anywhere from #2-8 on Google for them. I use MozPro for most of our tracking, and GAnalytics for our traffic data.

Thanks for any help, and apologies to anyone who made it through all of that!

submitted by /u/jakethedogo
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/abyccl/is_reporting_link_schemes_to_boost_our_google/>

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