As we demonstrated in Chapter 10, the quality of the links to your site is critical to your search success. As such, it is very frustrating to find that while you must work hard to attract links by creating quality content, others might use spam techniques and other unethical methods.
The good news is that major search engines and directories all have mechanisms for reporting deceptive practices related to their search results. Search engines receive many spam reports each day and they take each one seriously, acting quickly to penalize or ban true violators. Link analysis tools can be especially helpful for you to discover the bad guys. If you ever do need to report someone for spam techniques, include the following items in your report to help the engines evaluate the site:
- Your search keyword and the URLs that were found that you believe are inappropriate.
- The spam technique you believe is being used and your evidence for that belief.
- Why you believe this technique is detrimental to searchers finding the best results. (It is not enough for you to want your competitor penalized unless you can explain why it hurts searchers.)
Here are links to report spammers for each of the major search engines.
| Search Engine | Spam Submission |
| Google Spam Report | |
| Bing | Bing Web Spam Report |
| Yandex | Yandex Web Quality |
| Baidu | Baidu Help |