The Ethics of 'shopping the competition'

your views invited

[4eyes]

So, lets say you find that a competitors site is using cloaking, or multiple gateways, or javascript redirects or text and backgound the same colour - whatever - to gain an advantage.

Do you 'shop' him for cheating? Do you compete like for like?

What tactics would you consider 'naughty' enough to report?

Other than reporting him, do you consider it fair game to submit all his pages to the engines 'on his behalf'?

You get the idea, morals, ethics, dog-eat-dog, who fights dirty, who fights clean, who gives up (err.. scratch that last one)

anyone?

[agerhart]

>>>>>Other than reporting him, do you consider it fair game to submit all his pages to the engines 'on his behalf'?

-Alot of times the SE's won't even ban a site for this as they realize it is usually the competition that is doing this, so nevertheless this may not work out in your favor.

Especially if instead of banning the site they ban all submissions from your IP adress.

This came up, the discussion of whether or not the SE's ban for oversubmitting, but for the life of me I can't remember where the thread is.

I personally don't think that you should submit all of their pages, but if they are cloaking why don't you give cloaking a shot. Do something that will give you the edge without jumping over the unethical bridge.

-A Gerhart

[toolman]

I've pondered this many times...and I keep coming back to the "do unto others" thing.

See, I figure if I concentrate on making my site better rather than tearing down what the other guy has done...then I'll be in a "safe zone".

If I step out and start smashing down someone elses sand castle what's to keep the tide from rising and swallowing mine?

[Brett_Tabke]

I reserve it for the most nasty ones (eg: word scrambled doorways - my pet peeve) - not really to hurt the site, but to point out the spam to the se's. It usually means there is a problem in the system somewhere. Other than that, I don't see any reason to mess with the competition just because they are the competition and good at what they do. It's a learning opportunity. What goes around, comes around.

[littleman]

>What goes around, comes around.
I've never turned in the competition. Tool and I think alike on this one.

[jeremy goodrich]

Good points here.

I've been oh so tempted before, but there is that problem what if they come back and smash me?.

So I've resisted "tempation" for that reason, and one other: it's not hard to figure out what somebody else is doing. If they are doing it well, tear apart every technique they have, figure out why they are doin well, and then do it better.

Just IMHO.
(edited to fix my spelling :) )

[Air]

Never turned anyone in, most times my approach is to re-double my efforts and beat them in my own way, sometimes it's indifference, it doesn't always matter.

[4eyes]

Much food for thought here

I asked the original question cos I have mixed feelings.

If someone is beating me by using techniques that I would not use because they are 'unsafe' or poorly implemented (e.g Bretts comments on word scrambled pages) I have this real strong gut instinct to 'bring em' down'.

It probably says more about me than it does about them, and so far I have resisted temptation - not sure I can hold out for ever though.

Guess I should be more buddhist about it.

[Hunter]

I definitely think there is a lot of power in just focusing on your own efforts and doing the best you can and letting the chips fall where they may. I've had to learn this the hard way with my other passion: stock trading. It's all about just trading to trade well and letting the results come along on their own. I find that the same holds true for me with optimization. We obviously can learn a lot from others as we progress, be they friend or foe.

[4eyes]

Although broadly in agreement with the general consensus ie 'concentrating on 'building your castle'.

I wonder, would I get a different response if I has posted the original in one of the other forums (forii?)

hmm.. I suspect its best not to stir things up :-)

(oops - edited spelling, grammar etc)

[Mike_Mackin]

FORA
:)

[4eyes]

thank the lord for senior members, eh

thanks Mike - Fora it is.

I did latin at school, honestly. I just lost interest once I realised that I didn't want to be a priest or a doctor.

..err or a lawyer, or a historian - on second thoughts, where's my Latin text books, I might have to review that decision.

[Froggyman]

>>>So, lets say you find that a competitors site is using cloaking, or multiple gateways, or javascript redirects or text and backgound the same colour - whatever - to gain an advantage.<<<

If a competitor is using these tactics to gain favorable search engine rankings over me then they are in essence stealing traffic from me and other up front web sites. I didn't build a content oriented database to have some punk with a crappy flash page cloak the SE's with God knows what.

Cloaking can be replaced with all text versions. Put it out where everyone can see it. Betcha more people (the webmaster excluded) would be interested in the text version anyway. The rest are just plain Froggy food for vengeance.

If I can force my competitor to purchase more domains to cover the banned ones then I have gained a fair and tactical advantage. You see, what goes around will come back around to bite you.

The real question is, what happened to truth in advertising?

[startup]

Do you know these sites are cloaked, or do you believe they are?
Have you ever tried competing against, multiple gateway domains? There are some sites that I know of that have over 50 feeder domains. Each one of these "feeder" domains comes complete with 20 full content pages?

Background and text the same color will get this site banned. Be careful this may be bait for webmasters who steel pages and code.