If doing bad link building can be harmful to a website that means a competing company can hire saboteur to lower or destroy the reputation of another competing company?
I have a few sites that, if you have some spare time, you can try to build up a few thousand bad backlinks for me.
i have hear murmurings that you can negaively effect a competitor but i have yet to see it happen. i think it's more about who you link out to, rather than who links to you. having said that if a hundred porn sites linked to, say, dell.com, what would it do to the rankings?
With all the brilliant people that Google has employed don't you think they have thought of this? Building bad links and to many to fast is a myth.
Sorry, but you're trying to talk about something you don't understand. Yes, links can be harmful, but their negative effect fully depends on website's power. It's extremely hard to push out any site from serp but such bad links will prevent a new site from moving to serp. That's why when you are trying to promote a site with thousands bad spammy links you can't see any positive effect, because they neutralize SEO-effect of new good links.
My point in saying this is that so many people are worried that to many spammy links have a negative affect on their site and that's not true, worst case scenario you are just wasting your time obtaining them. I agree that after obtaining thousands of bad spammy links you can't see any positive effect and that's because Google ignores these links. However I don't agree that they neutralize the SEO-effect of new good links. Just check out this video http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-interview-with-googles-maile-ohye