Well, I am just curious if google finds you buying links due to your competitor reported you, how tough was it? drop dead? drop serp of 2 pages? or...? and how long did it take to regain some similiar serp as before? anyone? it's part of my paper plz.
You'll never know if someone reported you. There is no way to positively know why your SERPS dropped, it happens all the time without doing anything as google tweaks their algorithm hundreds of times per year. I would never look to a forum for answers that could be used to come to a conclusion. A lot of what is posted is wrong to begin with - and there are a lot of kooky theories being posted. If it rains tomorrow, and your site drops, does that mean rain affects SERPS? Of course not, but you'll find a lot of people making guesses based on drops that are just plain crazy. A SERPS drop because of paid links pointing to your site is extremely rare. Google "Bowling" used to work, but that left the door open to competitors buying paid links for sites that were outranking them in order to kick them out of the rankings. Google has since change their algorithm and it's policy is to ignore links they feel are paid and penalize the site selling the links. I have a site where a competitor bought over 100K backlinks (according to yahoo site explorer) and pointed them to a site I own in an obvious attempt to get me a penalty. The anchor text was some made up keyword. It had no affect, positive or negative, on my rankings - and those links have been up for about 6 months. On the other hand, they are showing 500K backlinks (with keywords they want to rank for) - almost all paid links and it has had a somewhat positive affect on their SERPS - although I certainly wouldn't advise doing something like that as it certainly doesn't look natural. It's obvious that Google is ignoring the vast majority of their paid links, but it would appear that due to the volume of links they have purchased, a few of the many are currently benefiting them.
Hi, Thanks for the input, I can't agree more. I also agree that there are a lot of posts or theories that are just based on peronal experiences or guesses, I wouldn't really just use some of what people say to come to some sorta conclusion. no. However, I want to get some more personal experiences from people who had this problem and accumulated them together and analyze that, even after a conclusion comes up, I will still want to test it out with some fresh websites. the thing you mentioned about your competitor buying links is really helpful. Thanks for sharing that.