Google over optimisation penatly = Competitor opportunity to kill your site?

With all the talk about spam backlinks causing a website to drop down serps, could this be an opportunity for competitors to kill off other sites?

All competitors would need to do is pay someone to create spam backlinks to a site they want to attack?

How would google prevent this happening? Surely it would undermine google search results even more?

Any thoughts?

 

My thoughts.....Hmm, you gave me a good idea. lol

 

You are right. Google can't stop it.

 

In theory, negative SEO should work. The sad fact is that it is easier and cheaper to eliminate your competition than to build up yourself, so if this works, it's the way of the future for SEO.

Disregarding the lack of overoptimization on sites that are either unrelated to the search term or just completely blank, the sites that seemed to gain the most from Penguin are sites that don't care about SEO. These fall into two categories: small sites with no backlinks because nobody (including the webmaster) felt the site was worth linking to, and multi-m(b)illion dollar corporations that consistently get backlinks because everybody knows their name already (Youtube, Blogspot, Amazon, .gov, .edu, etc.). You might not be able to stop anyone from buying text links from Matt Cutts, but you can probably eliminate the 1999 Tripod article about dog confidence training.

 

I wonder.

Now technically If I'm say 7th it would be easier to screw over the other sites on top than to try to work out mine.....Hmm, I'm going to try it.

 

I think I saw a video of Matt Cutts about this and he said that it would really pay for Webmasters to give more attention to Google Webmaster tools since you'll be notified about these things if Google hints that you're getting loads of negative links pointing to your website. He also mentioned that you can do something preemptive by sending an email to their webspam team (through GWT) claiming that you're not affiliated with the negative links pointing to your website and that Google can ignore them completely.

In theory, Google simply ignores negative links since they wouldn't want competitors killing each other with building negative links to each other. Nobody wants a web full of crap, right?

 

Because of that I think they just ignore the webspam type of links, unless their is an issue with the site itself like it installs malware on users computers

 

I don't think penalization is on the plate, but for sure can be a waste of time and efforts

 

scary thought but it's possible that some will use the opportunity to attack their competitors with it, but I hope Google has foreseen this possibility so they could detect such unnatural activities

 

The honest truth is that competitors can usually crash another site if they want to. Easy things like click bombing or pinging get a site taken off Google, if not worse. It seems to be fairly rare though, so I suspect Google catches on quite easily.

Hopefully that'll be the case with spam backlinks as well.