tedster - 4:44 am on Apr 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

I hear you. Having gone from the statement "There's nothing a competitor can do..." to "There's almost nothing a competitor can do...", Google has essentially admitted that sometimes backlinks can cause ranking disruptions. Now a lot of webmasters get concerned at the first sign of any backlink from the neter regions.

I still say that it's a whole lot harder to hurt a site with both a solid backlink profile and a solid business or informational offering. You might say that content is not king, and links are not king -- real substance is king.