Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In my field there are about 3 companies that have bumped around in the top 3 results on the search results for the past several years. I've worked to increase content and usability (thinking user experience before all else). A few weeks ago a competitor whose site had only been online a few months (and never listed in the top 10) took the #1 placement across a vast range of related search times. They've got small text at the bottom of the page like "...people visiting this site are searching for blah bloh, bloh blah, my bloh blah, my blah bloh,..." (keywords and spelling errors.)
In looking at the site I notice that they are participating in a link farm (bunch of sites with a common directory of unrelated sites), looks like all inbound links are on blogs, and they've got their site making the rounds on all the social networking sites with more "points,digs,plugs, whatever" than anything I've seen before.
Is this the sort of thing I'm going to have to content with in the search results going forward? Seems like a site like that would run afoul of anti-spam group. Any thoughts?
