Do You Report Your Competitors For Black Hat SEO?

Recently, I have been engaged into a huge debate about whether to report black hat SEO tactics and borderline SEO activities conducted by our competitors. You know, things like paid links, link farms, etc.

For some strange reasons and logics, I was told to forget about reporting the nefarious SEO activities that our competitors have willingly engaged into, but rather we should just focus on optimizing our own sites. It’s cool that there is so much faith from the clients, but I just don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t do ourselves some favors. There wasn’t much of an argument on the client side, and it actually befuddled both the other SEO specialist and myself in the meeting.

In many hyper competitive industries, gaining grounds in the search engine using only white hat SEO tactics requires a tremendous amount of hard work and time, and trimming your competitors’ competitive edge by reporting them for bad SEO executions would definitely give you an edge over the said competitors. For this reason, I would definitely fight for the green lights to report the competitors’ black hat SEO activities til I’m totally convinced with a perfect reason.

Personally, I don’t practice any borderline SEO tactics since I have always been working as an in-house SEO and I wouldn’t want to jeopardize someone else’s websites and the rankings. I know, as a fact, that black hat tactics do work to some extend, and it’s just being ignorant to pretend other SEOs are not doing it. I always feel that, if you could hide under the Google radar long enough to make some profit out of it, more power to you, but if you happen to be one of the competitors of my clients, then it’s a different story.

If for some strange luck that I somehow stumble upon your sites or discover some black hat SEO implementations, I would always report your site without a second thought. Always KOS. (Sorry, I can’t resist to use some mmorpg lingos) I mean, you should have anticipated this event way before you buy links, sell links, cloak or link farm, right?

So, if you share the same “Kill-On-Sight” attitude towards competitors’ black hat activities as I do, and you don’t know where to report paid links and such to Google, here are a couple helpful links:

Matt Cutts’ old post about reporting paid links and the unauthenticated spam report form.

Edited:

After hitting “Publish” on this post, I’ve found that Ann Smarty has also written a post about reporting competitors for wrong doings. She has provided a few reasons for both reporting and keep silence.

What is your take on this issue?