Matt Cutts openly admits sites can be sabotaged by competitors (Google Bowling)

Does Matt really think that not admiting something wouldn't make it real?

 

The effects only last as long as the occurence goes unreported. Google bowling rules, but only if it is driving traffic to your site. Why try to Google bowl, when you can just get links to your own site and beat your competitors based on link love?

 

ranter, you quoted incorrectly... you were actually completely wrong on this one.

The topic was in fact about bowling someone by pointing tons of links at them, which is what Matt was responding to in what you quoted, it has nothing whatsoever to do with putting anything on your competitors site.

Thing is, it might take tons of PR0 links to do it, but it might only take a handful of higher PR links to accomplish the same thing. An identical experiment is going on with that right now in another thread.

-Michael

 

I'm quite certain it happened to one of my sites, I'm 90% sure a competitor used a bad neighbourhood against it. Oh well..I can fight fairly, and do a bad PR blitz against my competitors.

 

Pointing links from a bad neighborhood wouldn't do it. If it were that easy everyone would be bowling everyone else.

-Michael

 

ROFL!!! Now that's a funny analysis of Matt. However, he is pretty well clued up on all of Google's goings

Col

 

You might to read the comment Matt Cutts added to that story before you get too excited:

Comments
Posted by Matt Cutts at July 4, 2007 12:08

 

Right, he does add additional illegal methods how it could be done. But that's not the point. He was just trying to distract from the fact that he did confirm it can be done merely by pointing links at them. I mean, we all know it's a bad idea to build up links too fast sometimes, and can lead to a BLOOP... he just confirmed that they wouldn't be able to tell if it was you or your competitor doing the link building.

His comments were just normal damage control fluff.

-Michael

 

Read the direct quote, not the paraphrasing:

Now read it again in the context of his subsequent comment.

The title of this thread is misleading.

 

It's not misleading in the least. I read it. I understand exactly what he's saying.

His subsequent comment has nothing whatsoever to do with "piling on links", and is simply meant to distract from the fact that there are fully legal ways to harm your competitors serps. I'm not sure why you would think that his comments about illegal activities would have anything to do with him saying that pointing enough links at a site can harm its rankings.

-Michael

 

I think this confirms what I have thought about DP's COOP, Linkvault etc for a long time - very unnatural link generation patterns pointing to a site can seriously damage its SERPS.

This opens up the way for people to use such systems to get to the top of the SERPS by destroying their competition by suspect link building, rather than trying to improve their own sites by link building.

Now google have actually confirmed it, I doubt it will be long before we see some landmark legal cases where companies are suing people for trying or succeeding to destroy their business using such methods.

 

It turns out it's actually extremely easy to kill your competitor's rankings. I've been doing it all week long. For a highly competitive keyword I went from 5th to 1st this week.

 

I would have thought it would take a while longer than a week.....

What have you been doing to kill their rankings? - Using something like the COOP ?

 

I was surprised how fast it works too.

My exact methods will be kept private.

Fact is, Google's algorithm is fundamentally retarded. The only thing that kept the SERPs in decent shape for so long was people believing heresay and not having the balls to go against the grain.

 

Interesting. I haven't tried it on competition myself, but have previously bowled myself out the SERPS before, when I was trying to do the opposite (and was a bit nieve about SEO).

Method Used:
- Bought a couple of high PR link on NON relevant sites (from a major link broker, so the fact of purchase was easy to detect due to the html method of putting the links on the site).
- Bought a couple of sitewide links on non relevant sites.
- Used the COOP and Link Vault to point thousands of links to the site in a short time span.
- Used only a couple of very specific keywords for all the above anchors.

This combination bowled the site from top five ranking (which was solid in those positions for several years) right down the serps. What was interesting was that it only bowled the sites rankings for the specific terms that I used in the anchors - the terms I didn't use stayed put - giving pretty conclusive proof of cause and effect.

The results in google returned after I had removed everything above and left it for 3 months - however they never returned in Yahoo to this day.

 

Thanks for pointing it out. It is common sense that why a person will waste his energy giving lots of backlinks to competitor only to ban it from Google. People should use common sense.

 

I have been saying this since the seoblackhat post, people just didn't believe for the most part.

 

Its definately possible without the BS Matt said about hacking servers etc. So its called Google bowling now is it, ive known it for years as Search Index Management.

Nobody in this thread has hit the nail on the head to exactly how this is done, which is good.

I will say its not something you will be able to do to the likes of Wiki, CNN etc

 

Great comment, I think you know what you are talking about, the only way to hurt a competitor via backlinks is if they have way to many backlinks using one phrase and not enough variation, one too many links can cause a site to drop just on the one phrase (everything else stays the same), normally just a few places and normally temporarily.

 

Well, someone spill the beans. I'm sure this thread has caught everyone's interest.