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A Competitor Is Outranking You With Spammy Links. What Should You Do?

Not the same thing they’re doing. That’s the whole answer, and the rest of this post is about the two useful things you can do — verify that the links are actually why they rank, and report the spam properly — plus why the tempting third option is a trap.

It’s a genuinely frustrating situation. You’ve done the slow work, someone else has bought a few hundred links, and they’re above you. The frustration is legitimate. The conclusion “so the rules must not apply” is where people lose money.

First, check the premise

The assumption buried in the question is that the spam links are causing the ranking. Sometimes they are. Often something else is, and you can check before deciding anything.

Look at what the page is, not what points at it. Read the ranking page against yours. Does it answer the query more directly? Is the intent a better match — a comparison page ranking for a comparison query while yours is a product page? Is it faster, clearer, better structured? Search results are not decided by links alone, and a spam profile can coexist with a page that simply fits the query better.

Check whether the site has a real audience. A site with substantial organic traffic across many queries is a site search engines are treating as generally useful. A site with a large link count and almost no traffic anywhere else is a different animal, and its one ranking is more likely to be a specific weakness than a general strength.

Check the age and the rest of the profile. Established sites carry years of ordinary links that don’t show up in whatever spam pattern you noticed. The manufactured links might be the least important part of what’s pointing at them.

Check whether the ranking is stable. Manipulated positions are frequently unstable — up for weeks, then gone. If it’s been fluctuating, you may be looking at something in the process of not working.

None of this is a rationalisation. It’s the difference between “spam works” and “a page that beats mine also happens to have spam links,” and those call for different responses.

The honest position on what happens to them

Two things are true at once, and both matter.

Manipulative link building is against search engine guidelines and is handled two ways: automatically, by systems designed to discount links that look manufactured, and manually, by a human reviewer issuing an action against the site. What an Unnatural Links Manual Action Actually Is covers the second.

The timing is not predictable and not fair. A site can run a manipulative profile for a long time before anything happens, and sometimes nothing happens. Anyone who tells you the correction is coming next month is guessing. So “it’ll catch up with them” is a reasonable expectation and a terrible plan, because your business needs to work in the meantime.

What follows from those two facts is not “copy them”. It’s that their strategy has an outcome distribution you can’t see and don’t control, and yours doesn’t need one.

What to actually do

1. Report it through the official channel. Search engines provide a spam reporting form. Use it. Be specific: the URLs, the pattern, what you observed. Don’t expect a reply, a case number, or a visible result — reports feed into systems and reviews rather than triggering an individual response. It’s a few minutes and it’s the sanctioned route.

If they’re doing something separately illegal — copying your content wholesale, using your trademarks, impersonating you — those have their own separate processes, and they’re worth pursuing on their own terms rather than as an SEO tactic.

2. Do not attempt anything against their site. Buying links pointed at a competitor, or otherwise trying to manufacture a problem for them, is a bad idea on every axis: it may not work at all, it’s money spent on someone else’s site, and it puts you in the position of having deliberately violated guidelines. Search engines have long said that most sites can’t be harmed by links they didn’t create, which is exactly why the tactic is unreliable — you’d be paying for an effect that may never arrive.

3. Don’t disavow their links. Worth stating because people try it: the disavow tool applies to links pointing at your site. It has no effect on anyone else’s profile. And for your own site it’s a narrow instrument that most sites should never touch — When to Use the Google Disavow Tool covers the small set of cases where it’s appropriate.

4. Check your own profile while you’re in there. Not because you’re at risk from their spam, but because an audit is useful regardless and this is a moment when you’re already looking at link data. How to Audit Your Backlink Profile is the procedure.

5. Then go build the thing they don’t have. This is the part that changes your position rather than theirs.

The asymmetry worth exploiting

A site whose links are bought has one thing it can’t buy: a reason for real publications to cite it. That’s a durable gap, and it’s the one place where doing the slow thing is a genuine advantage rather than a consolation.

Concretely, the plays that a purchased profile can’t match:

And on the page that’s losing: fix the match. If a comparison query is being won by a comparison page, the answer is a better comparison page, not more links to a product page.

The uncomfortable summary

You can report them, and you should. You can’t make the correction arrive, and pretending you can is how the quarter gets wasted. The one lever entirely in your control is whether your pages are worth citing — which is slower than buying links, and is also the only version of this that still works when the correction does arrive.

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