competitors messing with my site theme?

is it possible?

[eclipse]

One of new google algo factors is site theme. Google can find site theme based on on page factors, incoming and outgoing links. What if my competitor will spam blogs, guestbooks with unthemed links to my site? Will it hurt my site, make my site unthemed?

[Macro]

Yes, it will hurt your site but it's a lot more difficult than it appears. First, you'll have inward links from decent sites with decent PR. They'll be posting you links on low quality sites. Second, some of the sites they post to may be ignored by Google anyway and G won't "credit" you with the link.

Your best defence against this is to build good quality inward links and let the competition waste their time building you cheap, value-less links ;-)

[eclipse]

Will it help to make more sites about the same topics, but with diferent design, contnent and link them all?

Now i have 5 sites about widgets. They are linked like this: site 1 -> site 2 -> site 3 -> site 4 -> site 5 . This sites all have the same theme. I'm thinking about adding 5 more sites and linking them with the first 5 to make theme for this sites stronger. Will this work?

[phantombookman]

This is something which has always puzzled me.

If it is bad to add your URL to auto submitters and link farms etc then presumably you can damage a competitors site but adding their URL?

Just wondering how it works
Regards
Rod

[rfgdxm1]

If Google is considering site themes, then likely the first place they'd try to figure this out is from the content of the site itself. Thus I wouldn't think this would be an issue so long as your site has an obvious apparent theme.

[Palehorse]

Your guestbook and blog should be denied in robots.txt.

[cbpayne]

>Your guestbook and blog should be denied in robots.txt.

The original question was about spamming blogs and guestbooks on *other* sites to influence the theme of a site, so a robots.txt is not going to help.

On the original question, I do not think that Google are that silly that they would allow this sort of thing to influence it. I am sure that if they are using 'themeing' the algorithm should be able to detect this sort of thing (at least I hope it does!) eg maybe they could only use the top 100 or so ranked sites for a keyword to use in the "themeing" part of the algorithm (assuming they are actually using themeing) - that way all the guestbooks and blogs will not be counted toward the theme calculation/score, as we could assume they are not in the top 100 ... all speculation on my part, so DON't quote me.

[glengara]

*Now i have 5 sites about widgets. They are linked like this: site 1 -> site 2 -> site 3 -> site 4 -> site 5 .*

I suspect you're more a danger to yourself through cross-linking than anything a competitor could do to ruin your theme....

[eclipse]

i'm not cross-linking all sites i play safe with linking. only some the site i'm linking to DON't link back and not all are linked juz few, but i also have other out-links. Each site has diferent domain and IP

[glengara]

I noted that Eclipse, though I also suspect G has improved their capabilities to the extent that "safe" may need to be redefined...

[eclipse]

So what is the best way to link sites?

[glengara]

From relevant content within inner pages.
Though that may not be what you wanted to hear.. ;-)

[BigDave]

Worry about working on your own site, and be thankful to your competitors for giving you a boost, which is the most likely result of such actions.

Your linking plan is at least as dangerous as anything that they are doing to you.

[eclipse]

but i'm linking from content, from links are not hidden. They are surounded by text

[SyntheticUpper]

<snip, -off topic>

[eclipse]

I lost my positions ;(. Now when i click "Similar pages" for my site i have blogs, guestbook and othet sh*t. So i'm sure that blog/gb spam hurt my site. Before this i had only theme-close sites in Similar pages.

How can i recover from that? I'm in very competitive field, top sites now have strong network of links. There are 5 sites wich dominates the serps.

[glengara]

I don't think off-topic links are being discounted yet, so as others have mentioned, they'll help more than hinder.

As to regaining your theme, some on-topic incomings will of course help, as would some on-topic outgoings from inner pages, but I somehow doubt theme dilution was the cause of your fall in the SERPs....

[Macro]

eclipse, glangara's probably right.

Concentrate on building more quality incoming links. And spend less time worrying about what the competitors are doing. For every hour you spend building incoming links they'll have to spend 100 hours getting you pretty useless ones. It's a game you can only win.