Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Some search marketers question whether tactics like Google bowling even exist. Google's Webmaster Central site, designed to answer search marketers' queries, says merely, "There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." But Duke, and many search marketers, take that "almost" as a concession from Google that negative SEO does occur.
The Saboteurs Of Search
[forbes.com...]
The other methods have also been discussed on WebmasterWorld.
Is Forbes is just catching on?
The downside to getting all of these links to the competition is that it will boost them on MSN, and perhaps on Yahoo (I've seen mixed results w/Yahoo).
Edit: I should have read the article first before posting my comment. :) Basically, what I just said is mentioned in the article. In general, I think Google hurting a site for getting too many links is bull#*$!, which is why I hope everyone finds out about this and they make a change to their filters.
Are you friggen kidding me, that's the very definition of SEO.
The opposite of "Improve Your Ranking" is "Harm Your Competitors Ranking".
Maybe google should think more about discounting or ignoring 100's of links, paid links, etc.. to a site than penalizing the site.
Google is a joke still.
To clarify, here are a couple reasons why it isn't impossible:
- identity theft means that someone can steal your site out from under you. See for example the storied history of sex.com
- someone could hack your site and put spam all over your siteThose are extreme examples (and would also be illegal in the U.S.), but that's why I didn't exclude the possibility of someone sabotaging another person's site.
thousands of links to your competitor's site using the same exact anchor text and description
And that is sooooo... not true.
There is a war on search terms, and when there us a war, no rules apply, and someone always gets dumped.
my main competitor apparently is that exception, and it is very SAD.
The main keyword in our niche is their domain name since the end of 1998, the site is hosted on dedicated server, and gets about 100 content/text reach pages added monthly.
It has a lot of backilinks from EDUs and is a #1 Authority WebSite in our niche hands down thru out the world. They do everything by the book. They have been in DMOZ and yahoo directory for years, they still rank for that term on Y and MSN. It is a PR5 site with thousands of natural and quality backinks.
It has been recently positioned on Google NOT as #1 for that search term. #1 spot is taken by a blog-type shopping site that currently running a huge special on widgets, and a special ends in April of this year.
And here are their key issues:
a. [webmasterworld.com...]
b. Another site – new site also took their aged articles as well as a home page text, modified it a bit(maybe 3-4% changed to reflect their domain name) and post it on their site.
Very Sad, Just imagine loosing "I am felling Lucky" to some shmuck.
>:-)
After approx 150 links were visable, each page disappeared from the top 1000 results.
The pages were only affected when searching for the phrase used as anchor text.
Seems to me that taking an individual page out of the results for a specific keyword is far to simple.
Just wanted to add - all 3 sites were mine.
I always thought getting a story on the Digg homepage would be cool but remember to be careful what you wish for as you just might get it...
