• Search Engine Guide, Monday, December 17, 2007 12:45 PM

You may be above using black-hat tactics to maintain a client's site, but what happens when a competitor's dirty SEO tricks have a negative impact on all the hard work you've done? According to Diane Aull, dealing with a black-hat bully is much like dealing with a playground bully -- and she offers a strategy for handling them pulled right out of a grade school handbook.

The first step is to make sure that the negative effects (be it loss of traffic, poor conversions or other metrics) aren't a result of your own missteps. Combing your site's meta-data and robots.txt file for errors, as well as usability and content quality issues, is key to ensuring that you don't wrongfully accuse someone else of playing dirty.

Once you're sure that the effects are due to a competitor's tactics, Aull says that there are five options to consider -- each with their own pros and cons. You can take the high road and ignore the dirty tricks, possibly risking falling further down in the SERPs, or you can fight back with some spammy tactics of your own (and possibly get penalized by the engines right alongside your competitor).

You can also report the spammer directly to the engines -- though Aull notes that they may not actually do anything about it, and the competitor may just get better at cloaking her efforts. There's the option of avoiding the Web site bully by targeting longer tail keywords and audiences that he's likely not thinking of -- essentially neutralizing the effects of his black-hat tactics by ranking better overall.

Lastly Aull says that you should be part of a solid Web community -- ensuring that you have high quality inbound links (and link-worthy content) to pull in lots of non-search traffic. And she notes that the most effective strategy will probably be some combination of each method.

Read the whole story at Search Engine Guide »