Squidoo lens pushed out Google serps by spammy competitor tactic..

[Ties]

I have a Squidoo page on Permanent Wrist Tattoo Designs. ( I also learned tattoo design memberships don't convert but now I just want to learn from this experience)

My page ranked in Google on the first serp for wrist tattoo designs. It was deep crawled because it has a Pagerank. It started to get more visitors until suddenly it had disappeared from the Google serps. After a little research I found out that Google only displays 1 or 2 lenses from Squidoo for any particular search query.

What had happened is that someone with a tribal tattoo page had put the keyword Wrist tattoo in his title and now he ranks instead of my page. At that moment he probably had more traffic and a higher PR 4 (mine is PR2)

From then I have written another article and posted on Ezine articles, written some new content and gathered extra links on Yahoo answers, Hyves (a Dutch community site) Hubpages and a few small directories. At this moment I outrank his page within Squidoo but if he keeps getting wrist tattoo traffic from G I won't be able to keep up.

What I don't understand is why Google prefers that page over mine while his page is totally not about wrist tattoos. He has only mentioned the term twice in his content.

To me this looks like some sort of gray hat spammy tactic. Will the next deep crawl clear this up? I was wondering if someone could tell me more about this.

 

[djbaxter]

What I don't understand is why Google prefers that page over mine while his page is totally not about wrist tattoos. He has only mentioned the term twice in his content.

You can submit a report to Google regarding shady SEO tactics. If the page title indeed misprepresent the page content, Google will take the necessary action.

However, be aware that it's not all about content... it may be that the page that's overtaken yours has more links pointing to it using "Wrist tattoo" as the anchor text.

 

[Ties]

Thanks Minstrel. I have thought about that. It seems unlikely to me though while that page is not about wrist tattoos.
I have just checked it with the Seomoz Linkscape tool and none of his anchor text's has wrist tattoo in it.

Can submitting such a report have bad consequences for my page?

 

[djbaxter]

No, not likely. You are reporting "search engine spam". It will be investigated but you will not be given any feedback as to the outcome.

 

[jcorkern]

It could also be the links that have the word "tattoos" in it, and they just have a lot more of them or some from other high PR pages with just that as an anchor, It could also be utilizing h tags, bold, itallics, underlining, alt tags and the list goes on and on.

Now, sinnce the other one is a page about "tattoos" and the wrist is covered 2 times, as you have stated, that it is relevant and a report is going to do absolutely nothing but waster your time filling out the form.

Go in, do some more onpage and start building more links with the proper anchor text. It is already obvious that he is beating you in PR which means he has more authority on "tattoos" than you do on yours.

This is not a spam issue from what information you are giving, they are just beating you.