Forum Moderators: open
Reason I ask is that there is a fellow who claims that competitors or people that didn't like him submitted his site to a bunch of link farms and a couple of his sites were banned or penalized (not in Google anymore) after this last update. His sites were up so it wasn't a problem of them not being available to be crawled.
If it were that easy why wouldn't we all be getting our competitors banned?
Thanks.
however, there are few people who might think different.
P.S... generally sticking to Google guidelines *should* keep you safe.
Actually from google site "There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index."
By saying there is almost nothing that implies there are some things...
He may think he was banned by competitors adding him to link farms. But it is more likely that there were other factors involved that he did not look at.
I think that pretty much sums it up.
I'm almost sure there are ways that you can cause harm to your competitors, but I seriously doubt submitting a site to be listed on various FFA pages or link farms will cause anyone problems.
I'd look for other reasons than what they're suggesting.
This fellow has made a killing doing various legal things on the net. He decided a few months ago to share with others how he was making his killing so he wrote an ebook. The ebook is about a lot of things as far as making money on the net but there is a part about his SE techniques.
Part of his process is using (what other SEOs have said are basically doorways) pages that use either a Javascript redirect, Flash, or frames.
He put a fancy name on these type pages and tons of people started going crazy putting these new type pages up. He's making another killing selling this new ebook.
He publishes a newsletter and to prove his theories work he would share URLs of his and other's sites who had gotten quick high rankings using his techniques.
Everyone was happy until this last update. Some of those URLS he shared are all the sudden out of Google. Some of these pages had been in the top 5 for months.
So some of the SE experts, who have been warning about these pages, came out and said basically "see I told you so - if you're going to do sneaky things you better be awfully careful and better yet don't do them if you want to be safe".
Well immediately it was claimed (to protect continuing financial interests in his techniques in my opinion) that the domains weren't banned due to the techniques being wrong but due to someone submitting his sites to link farms.
Of course I don't know all the story. Based on this would you say he got banned by a competitor or Google shut him down for tricking the engines?
Google would be justified in banning his sites as a public service to keep innocent customers from buying his bad advice.
Being that their are so many niches, google must have to reply on competitors "policing" adherence to their etiquette policies.
I have a competitor who is ranking #1 and has a ton of hidden text, but I am scared to submit a spam report from my computer from reports of my cookies identifying me.
