Competitor can sabotage your website through Google
According Webmaster world, Google is allowing other Webmasters (who could also be your competitors) to damage your site and destroy its online credibility. It is a harsh reality that these days many Webmasters deploy dirty trade tricks to defame a competitive website. This is also known as ‘Google Bowling’. Some of the most common deceitful tactics employed these days are:
1. Spam: A competing Webmaster can use scam script that will leave your site’s URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This would make the Google spiders believe that you are spamming those sites. This will greatly affect your ranking and credibility as well.
2. Banning a Domain in Social Media: Many competitors create multiple accounts in social media sites and use those accounts to repeatedly submit your content. This continued process of submission results in a Flag or ban from the media site, as the Webmaster thinks that you are promoting your site through unfair means.
3. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content doesn’t usually escape Google’s filters, and thus only original version is ranked. However, the search engines aren’t able to distinguish as to which website was the publisher of the original content. Thus, taking advantage of this drawback a competitor can cleverly monitor your site via RSS feeds and the moment new content is put up on your site, he can rip it off and post an identical content as the original. This could severely hamper your site rankings, as Google considers duplicate content as an indicator for spam sites.
4. Denial of service (DOS) attack: Although it is very easy to prosecute the perpetrator of this crime, still it is one of the widely used online sabotage technique. With this method, a competitor overwhelms your server with external communication requests, till the time the server is forced to reset, or it can no more serve pages to legitimate visitors. This sort of an attack can severely disrupt an ongoing promotional campaign, when the server shuts down in the middle of it, and drives away the traffic from the website.
5. Kicked out of Adsense: Since Google Adsense is one of the primary sources of income for most Webmasters, an attack that could ban a site owner from Adsense would be a crippling blow. A competitor could initiate a click attack campaign. By repeatedly clicking on the advertisements on your website, a saboteur could easily trigger a flag at Google that the clicks received are illegitimate. Google would assume, that it is you doing so as to increase your payout and will ban you (often this ban comes without any warning).
These are just some of the ways by which a competitor can sabotage your Google ratings and either put you at the bottom of the SERPs or entirely kick you out of the online business.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. Gerry writes for SOMReport, My Entertainment News, DataGrant Venture Capital News and Buy a Car Review.
