A client has a leading competitor who has created 100 or so blog sites with little depth – Google gives them a top ranking on every related term in the industry. Why does this tactic still win? I thought this was crap hat tactics.

Crap hat tactics is a term Danny Sullivan used at a recent conference, where he’s just annoyed when people do spammy, junky staff that doesn’t really help anybody on the web.

Laura (person that asked the question), do a spam report and give us some specifics. Man, I’d love to check it out! I think that our scoring does pretty well on finding links that shouldn’t be crediting, but we love to get new data on things that we should be doing better, or link exchanges that appear to be defusing if they are really, really excessive. Send us in report so we can check it out because that’s the sort of stuff we love to get. And then we’ll see where it goes from there. Thanks.

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1. How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?
2. If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any “credit” in Google’s eyes for having inbound links?
3. Do you think web search will ever make use of references (web site mentions that are not links) as a ranking signal?
4. Why are the UK SERPs still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/AUS/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June? Why do .com sites rank highly in UK SERPs?
5. As Google’s algorithms evolve, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? By links I mean inbound link quality/quantity. Can you sites with awesome content outrank mediocre/established sites?