High rankings on search engines can help you to get a lot of customers. If your website has high rankings on Google for a good keyword then your website will get a lot of attention.
Your competitors also know that and and some of them might not use ethical business practices. There are some things that your competitors might do to sabotage your search engine rankings:
1. Your competitors might create spam under your name
All major search engines use links to calculate the ranking of web pages. It’s not only the number of links that counts but also the quality.
Your competitor might add your website to several spam linking schemes to hurt your site.
In addition, your competitor might use your website URL for spamming in online forums, social network sites and blog comments. Although it’s not you who is spamming the websites, it will be hard to prove that you’re innocent and social network sites might ban your website (which will have a negative effect on the link structure of your site).
2. Your competitors might peach on you
Did you buy links on other websites to improve your search engine rankings? Google doesn’t like that at all. If your competitor finds out that you use paid links he might tell Google and your rankings might drop.
The same can happen if you use any unethical SEO method on your website (hidden text, cloaking, etc.). If your competitor finds out and informs Google then it’s likely that it will affect your search engine rankings.
3. Your competitor might send a copyright complaint
If a search engine has been notified about a copyright infringement on your website then the search engine must remove the page from its index for 10 days. If your competitor files a copyright complaint against you then your website can be temporarily removed from the search results.
4. Your competitor might create duplicate content
Search engines don’t like duplicate content. If more than one web page has the same content then search engines will pick one page and drop the rest.
If your competitor creates duplicates of your web page content then these duplicates might get better rankings than your own site. Of course, this can cause legal problems for the person who duplicates the content (as all methods mentioned in this article).
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July 24th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Know of any occasions where these have been done? Maybe on a big scale like major corporations?
July 24th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Nomar, your competitor linking to your site with spammy links can’t hurt your site. Using your URL to spam would definitely be a hit to your reputation etc, but it would NOT hurt your rankings. You keep writing about this and it’s still wrong.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Bad neighbourhood links bro
July 24th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
I understand what bad neighborhood links are. However, unless you are linking OUT to them, you’re not going to suffer. Google states that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to your site that would hurt your rankings. Placing links to your site from bad neighborhoods is simple and if it worked, everyone would do it. It simply doesn’t work.
These articles go into more detail:
Exposing SEO Myths: Inbound Links Hurt
Inbound Link Penalties are Non-Existent
July 24th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
You get back what you send out. Bad character breeds alot worse things than just bad rankings. There is enough success online to go around than having to bug other peoples results.
Just my thoughts.
July 29th, 2007 at 7:58 am
People are doing different things to improve search engine rankings.
Nomar, what are you trying to tell we should not generate more neighborhood backlinks as our competitor might approach google ?
July 29th, 2007 at 11:33 am
No, I am not
Just telling you guys how competitors CAN sabotage your site hehe
July 29th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Hi Nomar,
you did a good job here by highlighting some negative aspects of the business. Of course we are not living in a world where everything is 100 percent bad or good, and the majority of all of us will have a good attitude, but if let’s say only 1 percent of the people have really bad manners still a lot of people are in trouble…
August 3rd, 2007 at 7:26 am
Thanks for the points Nomar. Regarding the first point about bad neighbor hood links, your site can get banned if you link to bad neighborhoods. I think incoming links from non-related websites cannot lead your site to a ban but can affect your rankings, if your links come from a lot of spammy sites with the wrong Anchor Texts which might confuse the Search Engines. But who ever does it, it will be an evil thing to do