Can Competitors harm ranking?

I thought that a competitor couldn't harm my ranking, I was wrong. After I read this article I see that a competitor can harm my ranking if he wants to.

Continue reading at :
http://www.brafton.com/news/google-doesnt-deny-any-negative-seo-tactics-in-recent-update

 

From my personal experience YES, one of my website was penalize by google. when i researched, there is so many backlinks from the porn and gambling websites. It was a really big shock for me But somehow i managed.

 

Best to check my websites too, now after I know this info.

 

In some cases competitors can harm us easily. They just buy bulk links from untrusted sources. There is no effective method to protect against such actions. If your domain is young then you might have a problem. If the domain has a longer history then is less susceptible to such attacks.

 

Yes it is possible there is something called negative SEO. You can report unwanted links to Google via webmaster tools, do a search for disavow tool.

 

sad but true

 

As karims said use the webmaster tools:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487

 

I also feel that there is 95% chance that your competitors would harm your ranking..

So what is the solution?

 

You could use eye for an eye strategy, but it is not ethical, plus it might be hard to determine who is using crap SEO against you. I suggest working harder to get quality links to overpower the bad ones. Improve your website and Google will eventually catch up.

 

if they cant beat you then they can do sort things like building links for you ---> but the other way around that would suffer your site...

 

As karims Said :-

First check "links to your site" in webmaster tool, if there is any unwanted links make a text file.
Open this "disavow Tool (search on google)" and follow the steps.

 

Negative SEO is very much possible. For highly competitive finance terms, this has been a common practice.

Google is smart though, they mostly know if you are the one doing it or someone else is doing the crap. So, it is not that easy to manipulate someone else's rankings, but surely possible.

In future, the dis-allow tool in the webmaster central is going to become more effective.

 

People will probably use opportunity cost to calculate time spent doing something. In the long run this is definitely bad strategy for any business.

 

Yes it's true. The only method to evade this position check your backlinks very frequently and if you feel that any link that you didn't created or can effect your sites position then send a request to Google through new "disavow tool" to remove that link.

 

I hope that google will come up with some algorithm that detect when negative SEO is used against a website and stops it somehow. Because as for now going through all backlinks I have for a small site is a time consuming job that I can do without.
Just Imagine what time and effort big sites have to put into this to be in the safe side.

 

Harm? With difficulty.

Through links seems very much like scaremongering (I haven't come across a legitimate case of negative SEO through links yet) and people capitalising on an opportunity (particularly when Penguin happened) to offer such a service. It's just another of those myths perpetuated by so-called SEOs.

However, if your site has UGC (or someone gains access) then I believe it's likely negative SEO can happen based upon content. (Putting up spammy content, adding cloaking, etc, the kind of thing that would invite a manual penalty or algorithmic demotion via an update.)

Personally, I had a site and suddenly found myself with over 300,000 crappy links. It didn't impact my rank for keywords or traffic, though (and there have been many updates since). I didn't even bother disavowing them. Most likely, they were all ignored by Google.

 

Well, it's kind of a thing that can affect someone and someone not.
The point is that even if you want to harm you competitors ranking it'll cost you a lot of time and money of course. That's why many companies choose to invest those money and time in their own business and try reach the top search pages.
However, it's important that you make sure to keep your site safe and analyze it regular. There are a lot of tools and web services for this purpose. Choose one - and be safe

 

Sure it's possible, but it's easy to harm only new domains. If your competitor is running stable business for years, there is no quick ways to harm. Google monitor new sites differently as most of them are trash/spam. So it's not so difficult to kill new domain appeared on Google by pointing from tons of link-farms.

Anyone who thinks to try running negative SEO, do not waste your time. As most guys wrote here, take your time for good things and build your own business with all the energy.

 

This is not a good policy of Google. Google is spend many time for launch new updates and did not control this issues I think it is better for google to spend some time to resolve this otherwise it is very easy to new competitors to beat strong competitor easily...

 

Yes they can do it use negivate seo service to get your site penalized by google.