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If I go to the doctor and he or she tells me that there is nothing wrong with me, that is very different to them telling me that there is "almost" nothing wrong. I would become quite alarmed should I be told the latter.
Google Facts & Fiction: www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html
Google Facts & Fiction ambiguity [webmasterworld.com] - Jan 6, 2003
"...almost nothing a competitors can do to harm..."
You won't hear a definate answer neither from Google nor from any member here. Take the almost as a fact. Although the wording almost is somehow vague it's also a pretty clear statement otoh.
(If ya wanna read past discussions and build your own opinion about that issue, just do a site search for almost nothing a competitor can do [google.com].)
A lot of these are flagged with his IP address, but he was dumb enough to use my email address as the website email, so I get a copy of all of the submissions.
The direct result of this is that we're getting tons of emails from these FFA sites.
I always figured that this couldn't actually hurt us, but since we're on the topic:
1.) Could this hurt us?
2.) What could I do to stop him?
I could probably turn him in to his ISP, but that would only be a temporary inconvenience... it wouldn't actually prevent him from doing this in the future.
There a a lot of ways that they can hurt you, but most are not simple or reasonable. That is why they changed the wording.
1.) Could this hurt us?2.) What could I do to stop him?
I seriously doubt that sort of tactic will harm you in any way. It should simply be ignored by Google. As for stopping them; there is probably not much you could do but if you could track them down in some way get them on the phone.
Believe it or not, I found this week that he had repeated the trick on another of his domains! My PR is still suffering. I shut him down again, but this is getting old.
This other webmaster is a competitor for similar search terms.. I don't even sell anything, so I am not really competing with this Internet scam artist, who sells freeware for $40 a pop.
I'm going to have to sue this guy in Federal Court in order to really shut down these tactics. As I put this site together as more of a hobby than a business, I don't have the funds to lay out... but I will anyway on principle. The other side of the coin is that unless you copyright your work prior to the infringement, you can only sue for actual damages, and not statutory damages... so copyright your content webmasters! And what are the actual damages to a hobby / informational website? There is no loss of revenue (you can't get less than zero). The good news is that domains are considered real property. Since this guy is using the domain in bad faith, I should be able to win his domains in a judgement.
Can a competitor hurt your site? Definitely. Defensive measures are highly recommended.
Good point. What Google actually states is:
"Fact: There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design."
By paying webmasters who link to a competitor's site to drop that link, and add a link to theirs, this could very well harm the rankings of the competing site. And it wouldn't necessarily mean doing this with all sites that link to a competitor. Imagine a hypothetical commercial site that gets most of it PR because they happen to have got lucky by having a couple amateur sites with high PR linking to them unsolicited. Perhaps they had bought the product, liked it, and mentioned it on their site with a link to the seller. With a sufficient amount of money, a competitor likely could get them to change those links. The net effect of this would be that a competitor hurt the site's ranking on Google. The way Google before stated there was "nothing" a competitor could do to harm a site's ranking was factually wrong.
Another thing just occurred to me. Imagine a site that sells the not-so-competitive shiny blue widgets. They currently are #1 on Google for "shiny blue widgets". Now, imagine that I enter the market for shiny blue widgets, and I buy a large number of links on high PR pages with the anchor text "shiny blue widgets". This causes my competition to now rank #2, behind my site in the #1 spot. By knowing SEO tricks to manipulate Google, and with a fat checkbook, I harmed my competition by pushing them down in the SERPs. Some could argue that I just out-competed them, but the site now in #2 might just see this as me using trickery with Google.
[edited by: rfgdxm1 at 9:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 15, 2004]
