Want to kill your competition in the SERPs?

So basically what is being said here is that we all know trading links makes you plummet down the search engines but now also buying links does the same?

I can't say I can agree with either...

 

Any updates on this interesting test?

 

I dont think it would work just by purchasing $25 in links, thats nothing. the only way I could possibly see this working would be to buy hundreds of links and use some nonsense anchor text to drop them a few places

 

Interesting.

I'm fairly confident its true, as I've experienced exactly this myself (when I was trying to increase my rankings). I believe its all a case of proportionality - if you have got a very low authority site, its relatively easy to knock you out the SERPS, if its an authority site it will take a huge amount of effort to have an effect.

in this article http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html , the guy reckons he does it for a living - £3,000 per day is not a bad rate, but I wouldn't doubt people would pay that to take a competitor down.

 

Instead of buying links to sabotage your competitor's Google rank couldn't you just spend the money on Google Adwords? If your competitors site has Google ads on it your link might even show up on their site. How great would that be? I think your (PLINKS) idea (having no real valid proof other than maybe coincidence) is just a waste of money.

 

This whole discussion is far too speculative. One reason is that if you see a two-position drop in rankings, who's to say that the drop wasn't a result of other factors? I bump up and down by 2 all the time for certain keywords. The same thing could be happening naturally in this case.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it's just not convincing.