How to deal with a competitor trying to destroy your Google rankings

[maximus12]

Recently we have been doing well in a very competitive market. We have seen several fly-by-night competitors skyrocket in front of us by spamming their urls to guestbook’s; sooner or later they get penalties. There have been allot of them that have been de-indexed and they keep trying to get in using their spammy techniques by adding their links to blogs and guestbook’s.

Now over the past month I have seen they have given up and are now trying to sabotage the rankings of the top 10 in Google for the same market. They basically grabbed the ten best ranked sites and are spamming our homepage links to hundreds of blogs and guestbooks. It’s not just our site but legit competitors with great content infront of us as well.

We have no control over this. We all know this leads to penalty but what does one do if you have no control? Any suggestions?

Thanks

[internetheaven]

A better, but long-term approach, is to convince everyone you know to use a search engine that doesn't allow competitors to sabotage your rankings.

[talismon]

Kelowna, you may be onto something here. I have seen a few sites I work with 'all of sudden' have an influx of spammy links and when you go to the page it's 'forbidden'. It very well could be people thinking they will gain positioning by linking out vs. trying to sabotage a site.