Can a competitor "hurt" your SE rankings directly?

[Buyseech]

Hi there,

I have read many posts,topics and seen some videos (even of Matt Cutts) regarding "bad links" and can to many links hurt your site, if they are not even yours?

So lets say you are linking like 10 000 links at once to a competitor and erase them after 1 week (lets say they were indexed)...and you repeatedly do it... what can you do against this "zapping" of unrelated backlink jumps. Google doenst know if you or anyone else is doing it.

This is question #1....

But most importantly...what can you do against someone PINGING your site constantly? How does google know that it isnt you... Massive amount of pinging has put a lot of my friends sites in the 1000+ spot...being on the #1 page prior to it. (He didnt know about mega-pinging being bad for you back then)...

What do you guys think about these two situations...

Thanx for your input.

Sincerely, Buyseech

[paulgl]

Pinging won't do a thing for SERPs. Massive pinging will be useless,
as most shut it down after the first if the second one is done real
quick. Keeps a handle on spam. But that has nothing to do with
google or SERPs.

As far as massive amount of links, the chances of 10,000 links
being indexed quick, in a day, or ever, are slim to none if they
are low level. They will be discounted, but that's not a penalty.
Not helping is not hurting.

Discounting links, like what happened to JCPenney, is not a penalty.
It is a discounting of links and putting the site where it should
naturally fall in place.

Now if your competitor went out and got 10,000 high level links
for you quick, google would love that. It's called going viral.

Sustainable? Maybe not. But that again is not a penalty.

Paul

[honed]

I was hoping someone would answer the original question! Good to know.

Paulgl-

As to backlinks, you would seem to know, is there a better 'kind' other than a high PR? Some backlinks are forum registrations with backlinks or blog posts, etc. Are some better than others or are backlinks all the same, PR being equal?

[Ben Armstrong]

Yeah I think a lot of confusion comes from people using the term "penalty" when describing what google does.

As far as I know, they won't actually penalize your site at all. The links just won't be counted, simple as that.

If they actually penalized your site in any way for unnatural linking then it would cause more harm than good because competitors would all be junk linking and pinging the hell out of their competitors sites.

Google will just get better and better at working out which links to give value to and which ones to ignore.

[BacklinkExcellence]

Originally Posted by honed

As to backlinks, you would seem to know, is there a better 'kind' other than a high PR? Some backlinks are forum registrations with backlinks or blog posts, etc. Are some better than others or are backlinks all the same, PR being equal?

PR is only one of several SEO metrics and not all links are created equal. An in-context "dofollow" link on a high-PR page with lots of link juice pointing to it that loads quickly, gets lots of traffic etc. is always worth more than an isolated nofollow directory link in a directory that almost has no incoming link juice, low traffic, low PR etc.

There are even more factors but they're too many to list all of them here (and some of them are not as straight-forward as the ones I listed above).