I had wrote a post about his on my blog, Semspot.com and I did not get the feedback that I was hoping for. You can read the full article if you like, but I would like to ask the question here to see what you think. Lets say your competitor just made a new site public within the last month or two. It currently has very little backlinks, so you take it upon yourself to start adding backlinks for them. You take Xrumer or even Prosubmitter and start pouring out the backlinks with either of these programs. Submitting them to hundreds of sites daily for a solid week or two. With so many links in such a short amount of time wouldn't this raise a red flag to google and get the site penalized? I know that getting to many backlinks in a short amount of time can get hurt your marketing efforts for a new site. So who is to say that by doing what I mentioned on my site would not actually get that website penalized. I know Google says that we cannot manipulate the SERP's, but I hate to think that this would actually work. What could be done to try and prevent someone from doing this to a new website?
Nothing I guess, but that's pretty unethical, and if you were to be found out, you my-as-well figure that your name would be ruined
Unless you want to spend money for paid directories fast approval, all you do is a big favor to him, since it can take up to 4 month to have a link approved in free directories. The links will appear to google diluted in a large "time space" ad considered as normal link building. Pretty lame trick anyway.
It doesn't use just directories, it also submits to forums, blog comments and guestbooks as well so there wouldn't be a long wait period like you have with directory submissions. It is very unethical, I would never do it, I just wanted to know what others thought about this blackhat method.
In the long run you can be shoting your own foot But my competitors are killling my new site by using proxy hijack as explained in this article and I must admit that they are near claiming victory http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking
I'm quite sure google doesn't give anymore importance to links in guestbooks. As for Forums and blog comments, registering to every single forum just for the purpose of posting a live link..... I don't know you, but when I see a comment like "good site!" + a link, I delete it immediately. Moreover captcha is a great help against automated posting. Doing this manually would be a pain. I'd spend more time working on my site, instead of wasting it to get rid (?) of a possible competitor. just my 2 cents
Nope, you will only be helping your competitor in the long run. I have a new site that wasn't indexed, I added it to a few forum signatures, then I really turned on the backlink gathering and got 15K backlinks in a few weeks. The site got grey-barred for about three days and then started popping up heavily in the SERPS. So, to answer your question, no, you would be helping them although any type of sabotage against competitors only shows weakness in ability to beat a competitor fairly. btw, for those who aren't aware of this, the best way to deal with a competitor is to try to make them a friend and work together. I've done this several times and we've formed a few mini-networks where if a visitor can't find what they're looking for on one site, we refer them to the next. I learned this from my grandparents having a hotel in South Florida and the hotel owners, if full in season, referred visitors to competitors instead of fighting for visitors. Also, in business networks, co-op advertising is a big plus (when several merchants pool funds to take out larger ads for the network).
If the links are really spammy and the competitor is not doing any link building it will hurt them from jump street. It's unethical and it the long run won't really do much and may help them.
in my experience google stil hasn't build any solid algorithm to catch paid links, so you will probably do him a favor. Only way you can get him out of serps is reporting him as link buyer/seller, but you'll need proof. Just do your site well and your seo well and win over your competitor this way. Do no evil.
Paid links still work in Google. I have some competitors juiced up with purchased links that are obvious and they are ranking better than ever.
Yes paid links do still work and Google is no where near close to catching all of them. If they were able to catch them all and penalize the linked site then all anyone would have to do is buy a bunch of links to a competitors website and wait for Google to catch all those paid links. That will never happen though, paid links still seem to be on the rise even after the update a few months back and the PR shift.
someone just commented you cant kill a good site............ =-correction-=you can for the first time in google history. it happened to brad fallons famous site myweddingfavors got banned for quite a while and had the best guys in the business working on it....... I am not telling you how so don't bother asking. and to answer this thread's question, no you cannot hurt you competitor the way you mentioned. google has already thought of this and has a system in place to keep from hurting your competitors. also google looks at your linking as a pattern....you just start out and get too many they don't ban you they just put you on hold to see if the pattern continues, was there a reason for the spike or is it the new pattern? then release some (you will not see all ever as they are worried about reverse engineering). you are only helping him not hurting him as google will still count the links eventually if you continue building them or not.... so if you want to test out your theory ...I'll pretend to be your competitior and you can build all the spammy, directory or forum links you want to my site http://www.trustseo.com and we can test your idea. : )
If it is legal to do this (and only on that basis), I would be interested in utlizing this technique to the detriment of a rival forum (I won't say which one - there are many). Please PM me to provide a quote if interested. AO
You can't kill a website like this. And I don't see why you would want to kill a start-up site that doesn't rank for any keyword phrase. It wouldn't even be a competitor. It's just malicious without any benefit to anyone. They penalize you for who you link to not who links to you. At most they could sandbox the site for a few weeks but after that it would go back to normal and maybe even rank little bit better in the SERPS.
the only problem is you can submit to 10000 sites in a day but they all wont verify and appeove them all at the same time.