If you feel it is web spam, I would report them to the search engines.
For Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
And you can submit feedback to Bing on a search results page -- be detailed!
It may not be fast, but it helps them.
For Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
And you can submit feedback to Bing on a search results page -- be detailed!
It may not be fast, but it helps them.
It goes like this. You want to hurt a competitor so you hire an SEO agency to do a bunch of black hat stuff to the competitor's site. Then you report the competitor's site to google in hopes that they penalize them. Now google is put in an awkward position where the site that looks guilty is actually innocent.
For Google, the best place to focus is moving away from penalties for the most part and just trying to devalue spammy tactics. It'll never be perfect, but at least this way you avoid companies attacking each other.
[1] Sometimes though you placed a big and a small ad since some people want to deal with a small company and not a big company so you needed both.