I recently read this: "You could destroy a competitor simply by making black-hat pages, spam, hidden links and so on! Post the competitors E-mail address as the contact E-mail address and there toast!!!!" Originally Posted by: Nintendo, King of da \/\/ack0s How is this possible and how can you be protected from a competitor doing it to you??? By the way, What is a Black-hat Page?
I doubt seriously that works... a webmaster can make a white hat site and a black hat site... get banned for the black hat stuff and nothing will happen to the white hat. The only confirmed thing that can hurt a competitor is getting them massive links early in the site's life... but even that will work itself out in a few months. Nintendo's one of those guys that will point a bazillion co-op weight at a competitor... he does alot of SEO contests, everyone's got him figured out
A competitor should be afraid only if he/she performs black hat himself/herself because his/her site can easily be punished by search engines and worse, be made into a nasty case study of "how not to do SEO" and shown to potential clients.
Pictures of black hats (!) and some thoughts on Google Bowling You can also find out where they live, put a pile of poop on their front door, douse in lighter fluid and light it, and ring doorbell. One would hope that people would have better things to do though - sheesh.
Black-Hat is using methods of SEO that are frowned upon by Google, such as hidden text, redirects from spam pages and dubious linking structures etc etc.
thanks guys for all your input. Another question might be: Why the heck do some of these sites rank well???? I've seen some sites that are so poorly designed and nothing but crap SEO tricks and I wonder, why are they even ranked? hmmm... maybe their ranking is temporary, right? What are your thoughts?
Could be temporary. If you see that their methods are a violation to Google Guidelines: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html you can always report them to Google: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html Just helping to clean up the mess.
Yes, if people are using black-hat techniques it's not a long term strategy. It can work well untill it's noticed by Google or reported to them by another webmaster. Often black hat techniques harm the ranking of a page more than it helps though. A long keyword list in hidden text for example can ruin the keyword density. Usually case of a little knowledge is often dangerous with SEO.