Submitting a competitor's site to the SE's

can your competitors hurt your ranking?

[Travoli]

I was just thinking, if a competitor wanted to hurt your rankings in a SE, could the person just start submitting your site to the SE over and over? Or what about submitting your site to all of those stupid mass link pages?

I certainly would never do this, but I am wondering if there have been cases of it happening, etc...

[Travoli]

Guess I asked a question in which guilty parties would never tell, and ethical SEO's are not willing to share info on the possibilities of messing with one's competitors, for fear of being a target of such action?

Hmmm.

Just wondering what my competition could be doing to hurt me. In theory.

[Hunter]

Well Travoli, at least with the major SE's your IP address is recorded during all submissions so the spammer could be identified upon investigation.

[Travoli]

good to know, I might ask the SE in question how to obtain that information. Thanks Hunter.

[angiolo]

> Well Travoli, at least with the major SE's your IP address is recorded during all submissions so the spammer could be identified upon investigation.

It doesn't change a lot; there are so many Internet Point.

I am curios about the question too:

> the person just start submitting your site to the SE over and over >

Which SE penalize repetitive submissions? Do they have something like filter that automatically check the suggested URL in their DB?

Does this influence submissions to human managed directories like ODP and Yahoo?

Maybe, is this the only good gain about PFP?

[Travoli]

Seems as though it is difficult to protect your work against this kind of thing. Kind of discouraging :(

[Brett_Tabke]

I think there are a couple other threads around here. I looked and couldn't find. (the one on "shopping the competition") was a recent one.

Bascially, I leave the competition alone unless it is scrambled doorway stuff that is 100% se spam (which is few and far between). Everything else is just good seo.

[scslawin]

Tracking your IP is basically a way to "keep the honest people honest". Those with intent to harm are not swayed by such a flimsy security method. The fact is, it is very, very unlikely that anyone would ever be identified for repeatedly submitting someone else's pages to the SE's.

Here's an article that everyone needs to read and illustrates just how unlikely it is that anyone would ever be tracked down by their IP address:

[grc.com...]

[Macguru]

One of my sites was submitted to FFA lists. At first, I was turning a bit paranoid thinking it was the competition. A little investigation showed it was one of my clients "initiative". Thanks for the help.

[Travoli]

Yes, and I recenttly learned that our programming staff decided to write and run a script that submitted our URLs automatically every week to Altavista. <Insert "mad-as-heck" face here> The problem has been resolved. We just got un-banned, and we the climb begins again.