My competitor has lots of links from people complaining about them!

[msafi]

One of my competitors has apparently scammed lots of people. So webmasters and forum participants post things like "Beware of <anchor>X Y Z</anchor>. They took my money and I never heard from them again!" Where X Y Z is a very lucrative keyword. X Y Z's site sucks really bad, and it has practically no value for that keyword, but they are still ranked #2.

In fact, by having those anchors and being ranked so high, they get to scam more people!

Does Google have any mechanism to combat an issue like this?

[msafi]

The complaints don't appear when you search for the keyword. I found out about them by using the "link:" operator in Google and Yahoo!

This 5-page, badly designed spammy website is ranking EXTREMELY well for several lucrative keywords in the hottest online industry in the region. Multi-million dollar companies are competing for some of the keywords that this website rank #2 for. (I worked for one of those companies, and remember the CEO talking about reading a 300-page book on SEO everyday before sleep so that he can figure out how they can rank for this keyword! Yeah, when it comes to Internet, we're really behind here).

So, there is no way the complaints pages will rank high for these keywords. My keyword is a little bit more niche, but this website still ranks at #2 for it.

[Excellira]

Ahhh. I misunderstood. I thought you were looking at ways to suppress those results in the SERPS.

This is an entirely different scenario (from my realigned perspective anyway ;-).

Now I see a few options which differ from my original thoughts.

You could approach each of those sites and explain the potential harm the link may be causing and explain the rel="nofollow" attribute. That sounds like a lot of work and there could be ramifications. I'd be reluctant to recommend that approach. Perhaps others may pipe in on that one.

Another option is to start building links and make sure your content is spot-on.

How competitive is the keyword phrase (in "quotes")?

How many backlinks do you have vs competitor? You and probably everyone else here knows this but I state it for those who may not...

In yahoo use advanced operator as follows:

linkdomain:mywebsitedomainname.com -site:mywebsitedomainname.com

Do this for your site and the competitor's. This should provide enough accuracy for our discussion.

[maximillianos]

I find it entertaining that folks think negative reviews rank too well, but you will never hear them complain about a positive review ranking well.

What is the difference? Companies post fake positive reviews every day (and fake negative against their competitors), and yes, consumers post slanted negative reviews every day.

So really the problem is not that negative (complaints) are ranking too well, because sometimes if there is an overwhelming amount of legitimate negative reviews, a consumer SHOULD know about it and would want to know about it when searching for info on a company. So in that sense, it works as it should by providing a valuable service to folks searching.

So it really comes down to the review sites being able to run a decent shop. Having a solid team of moderators that can help filter through some of the garbage postings, etc.

Most of you might not believe this, but consumers themselves are pretty good at picking which reviews are BS, which can also be utilized to help weed out the garbage.

In the end, there is no perfect system, nor will one ever exist, to weed out 100% of the fake reviews from those that are real. But there is a lot the site owner's can do to help this problem, and hopefully those that do get rewarded with credibility from the consumer community, as well as rewarded from the search engines as more trusted brands than those sites that just let any garbage be posted.

[msafi]

I checked the two most common keywords. Combined they have like 300,000 searches a month. The Advertiser Competition bar for both is maxed out. I asked the Keyword Tool to only show me Phrases here...

As for link analysis, my website is very new (20 days old) and I don't have that many links. So I compared this site to the website of the company that I used to work for. But I'm not sure if this is a fair comparison because the bad website positioned itself as serving a single city while the company's website covers the whole region. But still, the links are approximately 1,000 for the bad site and 33,000 for the company's site.

I think Google gives domain names more weight than they should. I see no reason for this website to rank so high other than having a closely matched domain name.

[tedster]

Note that it can be very easy to miss 301 redirects that bring in important link juice. Also the total nunber of links is not nearly as important as the quality of the overall backlink profile. But I also get a feeiling that "keyword in domain name" can seem to be turned up too high at times.