I am number one or number two in Google for all of the phrases I want to target, for example "AZ FHA loan."

However, every once in a while, a spammy website comes up above me.  I thought the Google algorithm was pretty good at knocking these sites out of the index, but not always, apparently.

I'll give you a good example.  There is another mortgage company in Arizona that likes to use black hat techniques.  One day, they passed me by.

Now if they passed me because I was lazy and wasn't keeping up with the demands of supplying Google with good information, so be it.  But they cheated.

I did a little research by Googling their domain name and I found that they had set up free blogs on many, many free blogging sites.  (But for some reason, they were not on ActiveRain.)

Anyway, all of their blogs were entirely devoid of any information.  Just a short paragraph, with keywords that linked to their spammy site.  (When I say "spammy", I mean that their website didn't make a whole lot of sense to humans, because they just kept repeating "Arizona Mortgage" over and over again.)  Grammatically, it was a mess, but I guess Google liked it.

But they used dirty tricks to knock me out of position, so I reported them to Google.

Google is a computer.  Or a computer algorithm to be more exact.  Sometimes humans need to be involved.  If you are getting cheated, visit Google at:

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Now please, please, please don't go around reporting your competition just because they are better at the search engine game then you are.  You'll be wasting your time and the time of everyone that has a legitimate complaint.

But if your competition is using:

Or any other black hat type search engine techniques, report them to Google.  It took a couple of months, but the local mortgage company that I reported isn't indexed by Google at all anymore.  (At least at the time of this writing.)

It's a tough market and we need to be tough.  But fair...  Tough but fair.