How to Fight Blackhat with Whitehat

How can a website compete for high ranking using only whitehat techniques in industries that are dominated by spammers? What if Google takes months to react to spam reports by removing the blackhat sites from index and by that time new blackhat sites are ranking?

First of all, you should focus only on whitehat techniques if you are looking for a long term business. Blackhat sites may be up for a few days or few weeks or may be few months, but they have to go one day. Ranking of the sites using blackhat will go down day by day but sites using whitehat in the same niche will keep rising.

Normally, blackhat techniques are used on a niche which is highly competitive and over populated, like when you search for music, a bunch of spammy sites comes up first. So, if you really need to target a keyword full of spammers, you should start with a little different keyword on the same niche and start to build reputation and authority. Let people know that your site is has either great resources or have something viral about it.

When you see visitors are coming directly to your site, not just search in Google or Yahoo or Bing or any other search engines and then click on your site’s listing, then you should slowly move into the keyword you want to target. This way it’ll be easier to get on top as most of the search engines already know that your site is clean and in the same niche. This technique is referred as “Katamari Technique” by Matt Cutts.

Besides reporting each site to Google, there is another way to let them know about the spammy sites. You can blog about the spam in the niche you are targeting. Google takes this type of feedback very seriously and may work on your suggestion to clean up that niche from spammers.

As long as you are pursuing the whitehat techniques that will stand the test of time, then over the passage of time, your site should be doing better the blackhat sites.