From some of the posts I have been seeing lately (and the answers given), it seems that it would be possible to drop your competitor to the back end of the SERP's overnight, by doing two simple things. Add a massive heap of links overnight for your chosen keyword - but for your competitor Perform a large scale visit campain to the competitors site over a couple of days, through Google, and then stop suddenly. Making the big G think, what the? It worrys me that a competitor could damage a site like this. But, you always hear - add links slowly, etc... So, is there any truth to this or would doing the above backfire and potentially cause a boost in the SERP's for the competitor. Not that I would attempt something like this. It would be a waste of time and effort. I would like to hear other peoples views on this scenario.
As has been said, it is a waste of time and effort. Google should be ignoring link growth factor totally, but they themselves are saying too many links from strange neighborhoods (link farms) can get penalty to your website. Ideally, these links should be discounted as having no value rather than getting penalty. Here's what Google has said: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/dealing-with-low-quality-backlinks.html. This is why it is possible to hurt a competitor by directing lot of low quality backlinks at his website.