It's Here, People Are Doing Anti-SEO

Hi Shaunman,

I once heard a Google engineer elaborate on why they say "almost", he indicated that a competitor may be able to hack into your website and harm your rankings in that way.

I believe those were false claims and the sites in question were not penalized for buying links, instead the link value was removed from the websites that were selling links. People sometimes have a tendency to jump to conclusions without knowing the facts.

It's always the link seller that gets penalized and never the buyer. In fact Google has no way of knowing who the real buyers are, and buying links aren't necessarily a bad thing in Google's eyes. It's the link manipulation that they have a problem with. The fact is that the seller is the one who controls the links on their website, and a buyer does not have control over the website and how the link is displayed (with or without nofollow attribute). Since the value of the purchased links are removed, the buyer is essentially punished by having paid for links that have no real value.

Note that they are talking about what the entire universe of things a competitor could do with that statement, not just sending links to their site. If I hack into a competitor's sites, and install nasty malware that gets picked up by Google, would that be harming a competitor's site? yes, likely. The point is, is there a potential crazy situation, like the hacking that could have one competitor harm another's sites? sure. Google is covering their ass with that statement.


Found that here, Paid links - Webmaster Tools Help

The point is, Google will not know that a site is buying links, unless the buyer or seller tells them that they are. Just because you have an outgoing link on a page on a site that sells links does not mean that you are buying links, nor does Google know that you are buying links.

Tom

Michael Graywolf wrote a post about this. I've never heard of it being done with text link ads, but he said links from Warez sites will do the job.

Pretty evil stuff if it actually works.

On the other side, I've heard of companies buying links to try to bump up favorable reviews--in this case they don't intend on bowling the site.

I've noticed that any time our site publishes an honest, unsolicited review, it seems to generate strange backlinks that help it rank well.

This story does sound crazy just in terms of the number of links purchased. Sounds far too expensive and excessive if they were doing it for reputation management or any other reason.

Regardless of him having a good site or not. The fact of the matter is, his site was unindexed from quality keywords he used to rank for. Im not sure if thats a "fluke" or not. I read previous posts who believe its just a nonsensical argument.
Personally, I believe that anyone can hurt anyone else's website through various SEO efforts: link building being one of them, as well as indexing hurtful websites such as complaints board and other sites.

As I said, it's just my own opinion of the value of his site. Everyone is entitled to their own view on that subject.

You can't even do that on the site in question! There aren't HUNDREDS of alternate sites listed for either of those sites.

Right. But you don't need to search Google for his site every time you're looking for similar sites to the site you're looking for. You don't have to search Google to find Google.

If you search Google for the words "similar sites" you'll find his site has a lockdown on the #1 spot. Clearly his site isn't delisted.

I do need to make one correction, however. I see that he does have a place for comments. My apologies for not seeing that before. I also now noticed one other thing as well, the first entries on each page are Adsense ads designed to look like the other entries in the list as well.

Actually, Tom, what he said in the blog post could actually work. His writing skills aren't very good, so you have to figure out what he's getting at...

Basically, find competitor's links, find the "good ones" like natural, high-PR pages and find the "bad ones" the competitor clearly paid for. Then e-mail the natural, high-PR sites and warn them that they're linking to a site that uses tactics which are deemed inappropriate by Google. The idea is to scare the high-PR pages into removing the natural, quality links to the competitor's page by spinning a false tale about being penalized by Google for linking to a site which bought links from another site.