What should I do about competitors who spam the search engines?

My competitors are spamming the engines with multiple sites for the same company. [Can I have them killed? ;-) ] What can I do about this?

You can try reporting them to the search engines either via their spam report email address, or through the "dissatisfied with these results" link that most engines have on their results pages. If you decide to do this (and I generally don't bother) be sure not to complain that "it's not fair," and that your site is better or that you're losing money, etc. Simply mention that the search results for the particular search query you tried is bringing up multiple domains for essentially the same product, service or company, and that you thought that the engine might want to know about this.

The results may or may not change over time, but at least you can feel good that you tried to help them to improve the quality of their results. They really do want that info, but it's unclear as to whether they will agree with you and also act upon your report.

(For the record, I don't recommend having the competitor killed!)

---

If you want more SEO Q&A, please sign up for our SEO Newsletter!