Can a Competitor Destroy Your Rankings

In the google webmaster guidelines it says there is almost nothing that a competitor can do to hurt your rankings. What do they mean by "almost"?

If it says almost then that means there is something that someone can do to hurt your site. What are these things? -- Not so we can do them but so that we can think of ways to protect ourselves.

 

may be they can add your site links in black list sites !!!

 

seems a little too easy....

 

They say almost just to cover their butts.

 

There are some links from this thread about how there is almost nothing that a competitor can do to hurt your rankings.

 

Yep, it is more likely for the legal action purpose. There simply nothing impossible for internet stuff. so by saying the above phrase, they would be able to avoid some legal action against them.

 

When you get very much inbound links in the same way very fast, google is penalizing this.
The "sandbox effect" also depends on incoming links. SEO Guru Brad Fallen has also called that the "google link trap".

 

I don't think there's anything a competitor can do besides try and take your website off the line to destroy your rankings.

 

Well, a competitor can always create a lot of sites that are better than yours and will rank higher .

 

Its possible to hurt your rankings if your competitor find way to disguise your site as fishy site.

but but .. is it any easy thing to do?

why your competitor should hurt your rankings?
why he should not work hard on boost his own rankings?

 

I don't think they need to worry about legal action over rankings, after all they have no contracts with anyone listed in the organics, and cannot be compelled to list any website.

That's why so many people warn you not to rely solely on Google.

 

Yes, it is very possible for a competitor to create many link farms and add your link to each one. This would not be good for you at all, and there's nothing Google can do to stop it!

 

I screwed myself once by trying to buy traffic. What this company I purchased hits from did was bought high ranking expired domain names and did a redirect to my site. I was able to select categories of expired sites I wanted to receive redirects from. I think I paid $20 for about 50000 hits. The problem is that google viewed this as a sneaky redirect, and I got spanked for about 4 months. I had to file a re-inclusion request and lost considerable more then I spent for the traffic, and as far as I can tell I only gained one sale.

So I say heck yeah you can hurt a competitor. Track down a company who does some redirects from newly purchased expired domains names and pay $100 to get them to give a competitor a whole bunch of traffic. Google will drop them from the SERPS in 15 days. I mean I did it to myself, so I guess you could do it to a competitor especially if the redirecting company does not require any site validation.

 

There are many ways - two easiest is spamming competitor's url in guestbooks and other similar resources and duplicating competitor's content on all possible sites and blogs. There are many other and just most reputable sites are fully protected from being abused in these ways.

 

That's true. Destroying a competitors site is lot harder then creating a better site then your competitor.

Moreover if you have a quality website with unique things in it. Then there is nothing to be afraid from the competitors. In real you are giving them a hard time by creating more quality sites.

 

Yes, but if someone hates you? So always be nice to other people.

 

Yes its possible, its called Google Bowling or osmehting like that i forget. BUt yea, anyone can submit your site to thousands of link farms etc.

 

The simple answer to this is no. If this was possible then what would be the whole point of having the search engine. You would see so much flactuations in the rankings. As google improves its algorithm, its becoming more and more difficult to mmanipulate them, which is a very good thing.

 

No INBOUND link will ever hurt you unless you link BACK out to a bad site.

Hmm care to prove your theory? Adding a site to link farms won't get you banned. Linking to link farms can though... Try it sometime...

Its called Gooogle bombing and no it can't hurt you. All bombing can do is get you an extra ranking for a unrelated phrase it will NOT hurt your rankings. And they are not created by link farms. Link farms are value-less.

 

I would have thought it would be hard. For a competitor to want to hurt your rankings, you'd probably have many pages of quality content, 100s of backlinks.... etc, making it quite hard to easily discredit your site with the search engines.