One thing I have been thinking about is that lots of people talk about shady link building and seo practices leading to your site being either removed from the rankings or severely penalized... well, i am not talking about any on site factors, I am only talking about off site.... People say do not build thousands of links to your site right away cause it will make a red flag for search engines and they won't trust you. well, since you do not necessarily control who links to you, couldn't your competition use a bot to create thousands of links to your site in an effort to ban you from search engines. I know this seems odd, but doesn't this make it seem like there is no way for search engines to regulate off site seo factors? because who is to say if the site owner is responsible or not. What if someone spams 10,000 blogs and 10,000 forums with links to your site that say: casino, viagra... and so on. Would the search engines care? Could this be the next level of search engine ranking warfare? What has this battle for the top spot created? Isn't it becoming more dog eats dog everyday, not the most relevant website? Please give your thoughts.
This would take months for your competition to achieve and seconds for you to report it to google. Is it worth it?
Go ahead... Build a bunch of backlinks to your competitor sites. It's more likely to help them than do them harm. Do you really think you're the first one that has though of this? People have been talking about it for years, and Google has accounted for this in their algorithm for years as well. It's next to impossible to get a site penalized for incoming links. About the ONLY way to get penalized for inbound links is if Google can prove without a shadow of a doubt that you bought links and paid for them yourself... and that pretty much means you would have to admit it on some public forum that can be tracked back to you (like Google's Help Forum while logged into your Webmaster Tools account). Google knows that competitors would do just what you're talking about to get you in trouble and damage your rankings at Google if they let inbound links count negatively in your rankings. If people put as much thought, time and energy into trying to make THEIR site rank as they do into coming up with ideas on how to "hurt" the competition then they would be on page one in no time.
Analyse your competitors, understand their SEO tactics and implement them if they're of beneficial to you and are clean but forget about "smashing them" out of the SERPs, it leads to one big mess. Not to mention, you never know who you're dealing with ... and if they ever caught wind of what you're doing or did, you're pretty much doomed for eternity. Keep it simple - worry about ranking your own sites naturally. If your competitors are doing "bad" things, they will eventually get caught and Google (or any other search engine) will do the dirty work for you. They want them out much more than you...remember that.
I've played dirty and had a competing search result banned from Google. But they were legit spam. Still, it felt awfully naughty and fun reporting them and seeing them go, bye bye!
negative SEO does exist , but its very complicated / costy / time consuming and some techniques used by negative Seo's are illegal, i will not discuss those techniques but most of the times it is not worth the effort, plus there is a moral side to it too, there is a huge difference between competing with someone fairly and getting his website banned once and for all, that guy is a person too, he had a monthly income, a family, kids, would you take foods out of their mouth even if u knew exactly how to get his website banned ? anyone who do so is guaranteeing himself a top 10 position in hell too.