Just as an update, this blog post popped up in my feed reader today that makes for very interesting reading :- http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=482 So I guess that you can screw up a competitor pretty effectively if you pause your own campaign and then run some kind of bot that increases their impressions on known keyterms without clicking. This may well effect their quality score too.
More theory without any facts to back it up. Could be 100% correct - could be 100% BS. Google's pretty good at catching bots - although I have seen some pros in that space do some pretty cool stuff. That said, unless it's a long term sabatauge campaign the results would be pretty minimal. How much does pausing your campaign cost you (in terms of lost sales) every day vs leaving it on and playing by the rules? Good read though.
Sounds like a lot of BS... You would have to pause your campaign, run the bot, it to run successfully & be counted in the QS algo, then resume your campaign at the correct time that QS would of seen a drop before pausing again before competitor QS begins to rise again... Not forgetting Googles QS places more emphasis on recent history so it equally wouldn't take long before QS is built back up again... A continuous cycle that could equally be effected by many more important factors. I don't buy it. Would be easier just to optimise your own campaign?!