Can competitors harm Google ranking?

[Ajaxunion]

Does anyone know if its REALLY possible form a competitor to harm your rankings? What if they sign you up to a service that adds 15,000 links to your site in a few weeks for your main keywords... Google will so ban someone for that...

Thoughts anyone?

Google claims that "There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organises information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages. "

[experienced]

i think this will simply ban your site and google will not bother (might be i am wrong here) to take any action if you complain. the same thing is happening when competitors made such time of scripts or scraper sites to extract the keyword based sites and link them from the bed partners or MFA sites or post them in free content pages with your main content and title tags and url as well..

this will simply wash out your website..

if this happens - you may try doing this.

1 - find out the backlink and ask them to remove if you find not suitable.. obvious if posted by competitor.

2 - try to get some high quality linkback to cover up the damage

3 - try to search your top pages content in google in quotes, if you find those sites using yours, you can simply change your content.

4 - if some sites are available with the contact information, report them to remove this.

5 - also report spam to google.

might be there are many more to try..