Can
You Damage Your Rivals Search Ranking?
"Maximise Your Website Traffic & Conversion Rate
with MKLINK"
Can
You Really Do This? Is It legal?
Well, my
answer is "yes" and "don't know".
I'm personally not prepared to deliberately sabotage people's search engine
rankings because I believe it to be immoral and because if nothing else,
I've got better things to do with my time.
However, in the increasingly iniquitous world of SEO, there are a few
tactics that have been reported to be used so I thought you'd better at
least know about them. A Forbes article mentioned the seven types listed
below and has caused a storm!
1-Google Bowling(Link Spamming)
Everyone knows that lots of inbound links are generally good
for Google Page rank.
However, Google 'frowns' on link farms and sites that have massive amounts
of links
to them - esp from unrelated sites. If a site increases its links too
quickly(e.g. from buying a load of links from a link supplier) then their
website can disappear from radar. Therefore link bowling is deliberately
sabotaging a rival's site by getting loads of links to them from unsavoury
sources and sites - e.g. link farms.
2-Tattling(Being
a tell-tale)
This is the practice of reporting a site to Google about purchasing
links. Even buying links from established sites is apparently frowned
upon from Google. So, tattling is 'grassing' a
company to Google that they've bought links.
3-Google Insulation:
This is creating loads more content than your competitor, typically from
different sources, so that any references to your competitors are drowned
out. In a few cases, this has been used as damage limitation where someone's
blog may slag off a company or individual. In defence, they publish dozens
more articles all round the webs to insulate the offending article.
4-Copyright
Takedown Notices
It is legal for a search engine to link to a site that infringes
copyright - unless they've been notified whereupon they have to remove
the link(at least temporarily - which can still be disastrous)
Therefore,
by submitting a copyright complaint, you literally force the search engine
to remove it's link. You'll appreciate that this is pretty strong grounds
for getting into trouble!
5-Copied Content(Content Spamming)
This is the proactive of deliberately adding duplicated content
to other websites(search engines don't like duplicate content) so that
they think the originator is content-spamming and therefore take a dim
view - with dim consequences.
6-Denial of Service(A DOS attack)
Personally, I don't think this really comes under negative SEO.
It's been around for ages and involves trying to shut a website down by
sending massive amounts of server requests(usually by hacked machines
or servers) to the host server, in order to overload it and/or incur huge
bandwidth charges. It's a real pain in the proverbial.
7-Click
Fraud.
Deliberately
clicking on peoples pay-per-click ads.
For more details, I wrote about this a couple of weeks back - checkout
click fraud.
Additionally, I can personally think of at least 3 other types
of crappy negative SEO
practices , namely ...
Search Engine Submission Spamming
This is where you deliberately register someone's
website with the search engines
hundreds or thousands of times so that the site gets blacklisted. Funnily
enough people used to do this for their own websites in the hope it would
help them.
Email Spamming
As it's name implies, it is simply sending mass unsolicited email
using someone's email address as the apparent originator - thus causing
lots of mail clients to block their address and add the email address
to a spam list.(More sophisticated clients and ISP's check the originating
IP address)
Social
Network Spamming
This is more recent and is where someone posts annoying, illegal, inaccurate
or defamatory articles on blogs, forums, MySpace, YouTube etc. whilst
pretending to be from another company or individual. Therefore, unwitting
visitors read the 'remarks' and end up slagging the 'offending' company
off in turn - causing a bad PR chain reaction.
Not surprisingly, this is essentially e-libel and causes people to speak
out against the unfortunate victim or company.
Conclusion?
Check
your website search engine ranking regularly and if you suspect any foul
play
just get in touch.
For more
details or advice about your website, simply call me on 01454
852414
or visit http://mklink.com/contact2.php?source=newsletter
'till
next time,
Mike Knight.
http://www.mklink.com
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