How Has Your Competitor Negatively Affected Your Rankings?

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There's a lot of talk around the water cooler and probably always will be regarding the ability or not of a competitor to hurt your rankings in Google's search results.

I personally don't believe it could happen (anymore) for a few simple reasons - reasons related to the Panda update.

The way I see it, is that a competitor could try to create "bad" links to your website but in essence could only really do so through low-quality websites. I ask, how difficult it would be for a competitor to create effective bad links on a site in which it would actually matter.

Link Profiles

I personally also have no worries about a competitor creating "bogus" links to my website - namely links with anchor text that I wouldn't be too fond of. The reason is because I believe Google has a good idea of the nature/theme of the sites it ranks in the top spots and a those new bogus links are merely supplementary or useless especially if the anchor text of said links aren't in line with the content of my site.

If a competitor creates a thousand bogus anchor'text'd links to my site, how easy is it for Google to determine the validity of those links? I say pretty high. Would those links change my link profile dramatically or at all? I say no.

My Site's History: An example: for years Google has seen anchor text on my website in the form of "this nice keyword" or like phrases, and suddenly starts finding links with anchor text that is way off and completely unrelated to my content. Do you believe that would ring a bell in Google linking algorithm? I do. Easily.

How suspicious would that be? How hard would it be to write that into their algorithm? Probably really difficult for a person like me but not for the scientists Google employs.

In Essence

The Panda update is all about quality. Who is Google to say what is quality and what isn't? We make that determination on a daily basis and no matter what we think, Google's doing it too. So with that, my supposition is that with the focus on quality, an effective bad link would need to come from a high quality site in order to negatively affect me and getting the placement of said link is highly, very highly unlikely - can someone prove me wrong?

If you've been negatively affected in the SERPs (search engine results pages) by a competitor please, share your experiences here. I personally would like to be enlightened further as to what's happening out there in competitor land and so would the other members appreciate your story.

Also, if you have any true blue bad linking strategies that you've seen work in the past and still believe would work now, please feel free to respond.

[NickTyler81]

A competitor could hurt your rankings if you are number 1 and they put in some good work of their own to knock you off. But I suppose that is the whole point of legitimate, healthy SEO.

[morestar]

A competitor could hurt your rankings if you are number 1 and they put in some good work of their own to knock you off. But I suppose that is the whole point of legitimate, healthy SEO.

I hear what you're saying. So can you provide an example of how this could be done?

This is the funny part - let's ask ourselves this too - how much time and money would an SEO spend on "hurting" your rankings, especially if you're number one in the SERPs, rather than spend that time and money on the SEO work for his site?

I think the only way a competitor could hurt you with links is by making those links good ones, and pointing them to himself...

[NickTyler81]

Well in that respect a full time SEO would spend all of their working time hurting your rankings by making their site better. In fact we are all hurting all of our competitors who rank above us for anything by optimising our own sites in the normal way. How mean of us

[morestar]

Well in that respect a full time SEO would spend all of their working time hurting your rankings by making their site better. In fact we are all hurting all of our competitors who rank above us for anything by optimising our own sites in the normal way. How mean of us

That's probably the bravest and most accurate response to this topic I've heard to date - glad to have ya here Nick...

[SteveGerencser]

Okay, one more time for all those people that haven't seen the old arguments..

First, this is NOT easy to do.. It requires a certain level of skill and access to known bad web sites that a very small percentage of people have access to.. It also requires the ability to crush a target web sites current link profile either because the target site has a very small link profile, a very weak profile, or you have access to a significantly larger negative link profile.. (think millions of potential links)

To do real harm you need to be able to totally overwhelm a link profile with known bad links.. There are plenty of web sites out there that are known to sell links, to deal with spam and spammy practices, and they have almost no value to do good.. They are basically dead, throw away sites at this point.. Now you take one or more of those sites and you toss links at the target site.. You make them look like they were paid for by labeling them "paid" or "sponsors" or "adverts" and then don't add the nofollow attribute.. Place them in the footers, sidebars, where ever, just so they "look" like paid links..

Now assume that you have a web site that has a small link profile, say under 1k links.. Then suddenly the site starts getting these "paid links" in batches of 1k or more 2 or 3 times a week for a couple of months.. At "some point" you have a site with 1k "decent" links and 10k "bad" links.. There is a tipping point that has not been defined where a site goes from it's just a site with a few bad links to it's a site that is trying to game the system..

Again, this is not easy to do, and it is not 100% effective 100% of the time.. But it has been done to multiple sites multiple times in testing.. Not everyone can do this.. Not everyone has an inventory of blown up sites, or access to people with blown up sites.. It is HARD to do.. Hence the reason Matt said in his video that they "try" to make it so that this isn't "easy" to do.. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it..

[morestar]

Now my only problem would be, if this were true, with Google for not allowing webmaster to report such fraud and because of that I have an inkling of a feeling that maybe they're not telling us what they DO have to combat this - at this particular moment in time.

[SteveGerencser]

Like everything else in the real world, it's about ROI.. Such a small percentage of people are even capable of doing this it's not worth the amount of money it would cost to fight it.. Think of the overhead involved in have a WMT database of links you flagged as "don't want" being blended in to the normal link algo.. It's not something I want to do, or manage.. Besides, what if I gain access to your WMT account and flag all your good links as bad?? What signal does that send??

Again, this is why they took out the language of can never hurt you, and replaced it with it's hard to hurt you and replace we don't count it with we try to not count it..

[morestar]

Again, this is why they took out the language of can never hurt you, and replaced it with it's hard to hurt you and replace we don't count it with we try to not count it..

Aha! So hard to hurt is interpreted in your explanation, and of course Google wouldn't need to disclose that nor are obligated to.

My last request on this topic would be that kgun come in and give us his ideas on the ability, from a programming perspective to detect "bad" links.

Calling kgun (Conversations creates communities and conversions create profit.)

But again, Steve thank you as you've cleared up a lot of air here at WebProWorld regarding this, not that it matters but more green rep for you.

[williamc]

Such a small percentage of people are even capable of doing this

Wait, We did.

Again, this is why they took out the language of can never hurt you, and replaced it with it's hard to hurt you and replace we don't count it with we try to not count it..

Right, exactly what I said in the other thread about 'do not' and 'try'.