Can You Damage Your Competitors Rankings?

The age old question is raising it’s ugly head head again

Is it possible to damage a competitors rankings?

or more often

Can a Competitor damage my rankings by link spamming my site?

The answer amounts to the same

Yes!

Woaah! Hold on I hear you say but Google says……………

What does Google say? It seems to me to be saying different things at different times, and most recently it is in what I would call ‘denial’.

The outcomes of the two questions may be the same but the processes are completely different.

Of course it is possible to damage a competitors rankings by getting more pages, more links and using universal search content elements to knock them off their perches – so the answer is yes!

Black Hat better than White Hat?

I went to a casino once in Atlantis and watched disgustedly as hundreds of thousands of dollars was bet on craps. It’s a funny game where the most successful players bet on the loser. There’s always more losers than winners. Black Hatters could rub your nose in the Google dirt, couldn’t they?

Is it possible to damage your competitors website by sending thousands of spammy and bad neighbourhood links to them?

We’ll come back to that!

Can a Competitor damage my rankings by link spamming my site?

We’ll come back to that in a moment

First I want to tell you a story.

I could have called this post how do you trust your SEO company but that’s for tomorrow as it’s an article in itself.

The other day I was speaking to a health insurance company marketing manager  of a UK based health insurance company with a crappy hyphenated domain, yeah I mean on-line Uh? What’s that all about?

I was trying to flip a high ranking domain for some cash, when this guy told me that they weren’t doing anything at the moment because their own website had been under a keyword attack and  had lost it’s Google rankings.

Uh? Excuse me for being thick a ‘Keyword attack’?

Impatiently he told me that his SEO firm had informed him that black hatters had attacked his site with link spam from bad neighbourhoods and that Google had penalised them by dropping them off the front page for some very highly competitive terms like ‘Health insurance’

Not possible!

I beg your pardon?

Not possible!

Look we employ the best SEO firm in the country that does the ……

Not possible!

So he tells me to speak to his IT manager……

So I go away and do a reverse links look up on Yahoo and check his ranking movements and what do I find?

Indian!

His SEO firm have all been down Brick Lane! ( A reputable curry street in East London) while they outsourced the coment spam to Bangalore!

So I tell his IT manager for free that yes he has probably paid a Google penalty for the quality of his links which the majority of the 35,000 are from spammy off theme directories and comment spam on blogs, however I also point out to him that I and many others noticed a seismic shift of low magnitude in the SERPS at the same time as he lost his rankings!

Caffeine! he says!

Maybe said I.  I didn’t tell him that Google rolled out Caffeine to .co.uk nearly a year ago as the test servers.! Every Country gets a major test update when there’s enough Google user data to warrant it.  The Mayday update just happened here as well affecting long tails and deep search quality, but only had a slight effect here, certainly no site speed and other caffeine effects that have been constantly rolled our for a while .

In the past they’ve used Taiwan and Korea etc – this time the UK. There’s been a lot of Google big shots living over here (and Ireland ) for over  the past year!

Yeah this is the UK and we are watching!

But It got me thinking about linking and doing some research!

The results are shocking!

You might think – Is it really more profitable to spend your time creating thousands of spammy links than creating valuable lasting links for yourself?

This very line of thinking is very misinformed! Word on the street has it that companies with big marketing budgets are paying thousands to negate your marketing efforts while they reap the benefits of scale!

What about if I outsourced to a reputable link building company (if such a thing exists!) to build links to my site and what about if I outsourced to disreputable link building company to build links to you my competitors site.

On top of that I throw in some automated bookmarking to say 50,000 accounts on the same day, repeatedly, hit all the spammy directories with every page of  your the competitors site, repeatedly spin your content badly and link back to your site from the spammiest article directories…

Oh yeah and for good measure repeatedly ping your site from 100 automated pingers every ten minutes to get you banned from the RSS directories.

And that’s just for starters…..301′s etc etc

Will all this affect your Google Rankings? If you still need to ask this question you obviously haven’t asked yourself why rankings fluctuate and don’t understand the gravitational pull off what goes up must come down!

The mathematicians amongst you will know that the answer lies in Canonical Correlation Analysis  in relation to nodal component loading scores – and whether those weighted values used by Google allow a node ( a webpage ) to have a minus  or negative score.

If a bad web page had a score of  ZERO then it would have no effect on the rankings, as Google states another website linking to you cannot (they’ve recently changed this to almost impossible as a caveat) hurt your rankings, a zero score would leave your score intact!

The problem is this!

It’s the minus scores in Canonical Correlation Analysis that make the process work!

Are there really companies out there doing this work?

Watch this space!

Soon I’ll tell you how to defend your rankings  – not everyone can!

No related posts.