Spammers - how to beat them?

[Samsam1978]

How do you guys deal with spammers?

A competitor has what looks like edited spun content (short sentances no background) mumbled together, bad simple English (no complex words) and now appears above my results - I think he has taken some traffic from me and others in my vertical. He has gone down the road of copying his own site a number of times purely for ranking purposes. When I spend 5 hours writing something fully researched he remains in his cosy rankings with basically spun content. I don't mind loosing a rank to a good source that is better than my own but this guy grates me. I know in time I will outrank him but it just makes me question:

1) humanity - how can someone create rubbish over and over for an audience and keep on ranking purely for money - what's the fun in that?
2) Google - do they not look across adsense code, ip, server destination and stop these spammers.

Anyone ever beat one of these sites?

[aristotle]

Pay no attention to what other people do with their sites. What you should spend your time on is improving your own site. Make it the best you can.

Don't even look at what others are doing -- your standards should be higher than theirs. Your standards should also be higher than google's.

[tangor]

how can someone create rubbish over and over for an audience and keep on ranking purely for money - what's the fun in that?

This is human nature (for some):

Why work when it can be stolen?
See how clever I am?
Smarter than you.
Laughing on the way to the bank.

Don't expect them to change and don't let them get under your skin. If you obsess over this it will interfere with your own work and lead to sleepless nights and poor health.

If you can PROVE theft you can file a DMCA and then move on. Otherwise it's whack-a-mole and there's no percentages in that.

[edited by: tangor at 10:53 pm (utc) on Apr 15, 2018]

[tangor]

One last thought. Further proof positive that the fabled g ai algos are rubbish. :)

[Samsam1978]

Thank you. I agree with your comments. This site is from Serbia, how could a serbian domain name and hosting (with 250 domain names on same server including spam) seriously outrank a USA hosted, USA registered, English based site. The content is not spam it reads ok but you can tell it is machine pushed and basic english even if not grammical correct, some information is even factually incorrect. I don't mind loosing rank to good content, but this niggles with me. I guess it is thoughout the interent. Spammers trying to whitehat producing low copy - SEMrush keyword tool. I'm going to give it another year and then quit if things don't improve. I'm not sure I have the faith anymore after seeing everything change. Linkedin outranking sites that I have read for years. I am not sure what is going on but it is quite a sad state of affairs.

[TorontoBoy]

SERP scamming has always been around. Once Google catches up with the scam then their positions decline and they try to find some other way. Once a user gets to their site and reads their content they quickly bounce.

I concentrate on good content and don't worry about other people. Think longer term, and better content quality.

[Samsam1978]

Maybe that is why they do a few sites knowing it will decline evenutally. Thanks for that :-)

[TorontoBoy]

I have a friend that thought he was so smart. Very early, over 15 years ago, he went to some conference and bought into a Google SERP scam. While it was successful for a half a year, Google eventually found out and gave him a lifetime ban. He says he's Ok with it, but I would not be.