Is it possible to damage someone else's website rankings by creating spam backlinks?

OK, so I know Google uses some form of spam filter for people who flood trashy link farms etc with backlinks, so what is to stop a competitor doing that to my website?

 

Yes I think it's possible to damage rankings by link farms and massive useless links.
But why would anyone do that? Focus on your own site to rank high instead of wasting time doing unethical stuff.

 

If you know the html or css, you can also write some process in your website, which can also stop spam. Also you can use some anti-spam plug ins to help you more!

 

Unfortunately not everyone is as ethical as you or I. If there is a way of trying to protect my site from this (though I don't know how!), I'd like to know.
Seems like a huge weakness in the Google algorithm.

 

It would be possible to damage their page rank, but I don't think you could damage their ranking for specific keywords.

I work for a large company in a very competitive industry. While no damage has been done to our site through linking competitors have done linking campaigns to negative reports of ours (which they may have created) to damage us. This is more of a concern to me than damaging pr

 

It is called negative SEO it usually takes a lot of work to damage other sites in rankings most people find it counter productive because all of the work that gets spent damaging others is lost work on your own site.
In the game of internet war Spam backlinks really don't do that much damage.

 

I agree with averyz. I work in a very competitive niche as well and haven't seen it happening so far and I doubt many people bother with it instead of making links for their own sites.

 

Thanks for your feedback, everyone. I can see your point - it would make more sense for someone to concentrate on their own link building rather than spending the time sabotaging someone else's site.

 

Wow..this scares me! I wouldn't want anything like this happening for sure.

 

i read this same subject on other forums and from what i can tell it can't harm them. .if anything it will give them more back links and a greater boost.

 

Not really. Otherwise it'll be a lot more people doing it.

More than likely, Google discounts the links from link farms.

 

Used to be in the early 2000's now you can't anymore,

Dearly fdamours

 

think positive

 

yeah, i dont think an individual only can do anything much harmful to other's website

 

Maybe you are referring to BlackHat SEO, I think it would affect your site more than you will affect someone's site.

 

No, certainly not... At least not in Google.
Only outbound links influence rankings of a website and certainly they are in webmaster's control. As far as harming your reputation is concerned, they have very less impact on your website.

 

There large number of user comment that using automate tool can damage a site, http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2155397&page=1. If the impact of spamming is low, so we should be no problem to using automate tool. Which the correct answer?

 

Focus on improving one site (yours) or focus on damaging hundred competitors' sites?
It's an evidence which is the better strategy...

 

Personally I think things like this can damage a sites rankings but I don't think they are so dangerous that you could run a competitors url through one and knock his site off of google.

My experience with auto link submissions are they they will only plant links in low quality basically mostly abandoned sites and they are a spam nuance to quality maintained sites, so your url can end up in spam filters, be tagged as spam and planted on link farms and abandoned sites set to auto. I have never seen quality links come out of those.

A lot of it probably has to do with what links you already have if you have a hundred good high quality links and someone runs a robot to spam your url it probably won't really hurt you, basically a small negative against a your hundred positives. If you have no links and you just collect a bunch of spam links that all you have is spam links could be a negative on top of 0 in SEO land..?

 

I always think of search engine is like human being. This is similar to a person getting popular, and small portion talk something bad about that person, others will not believe that. That person wont be get hurt at all.

In others word, by spamming a popular site.....actually we helping them to build traffic. Thanks for great reply.