My link pyramide experiment - Can I "hurt" my competitors with it?

Hi Buyseech,
There's might be no practical answer this type of question because SEO is based on assumptions. Next is there are no links that can be called as bad links, links might get de-indexed due to its poor quality but it is hard to say it'll hurt their ranking or not. So far as I think it'll not because I used BMR to build backlinks to few of my sites and even after getting all BMR created links de-indexed by Google my ranking is unhurt. Don't waste money on silly things link bombarding other people's business with crappy links, spend it to grow your business.

For all those planning such experiments to teach Google a lesson, if you want maximum impact, I'd suggest outlining your plan publicly in the Google Webmaster Forum itself.

That's where you will get maximum publicity in the right place, cos a few of their engineers actually troll there from time to time.

If it's a newer site, it could possibly affect them short-term or maybe not much at all. I doubt it would have much of an affect on an older established site though.

hey buyseech what free tool can i use to check my sites against a keyword ?

If you were trying to harm a site, using a pyramid is not the way to go. The whole purpose of a pyramid structure is to try to protect the money site from the negative impacts of most of the links.

Also, you're just as likely to help your competitor as hurt them this way. I still see lots of high ranking sites that use nothing but junk backlinks (forum profiles, spun article directory submissions, nofollow spam comments, ect). Google's on the warpath against a specific type of links (blog networks) right now, but most of the true spam they still don't seem to care about.

I don't think it would work. But, If you wanted to try it, set up a new site to see what happens. Worst case is your site would continue to rank and you could change it over to a money making venture. I guess you would have to spend effort on getting it ranked first to see if it fell in the SERPs.

The truth of the matter is, that I have yet to have any of my "experimental" sites (I built over 100 in the past 2 years) fail to regain their previous rankings even if penalised (and sandboxed).

It would be more of a mental game to pounce on new competitors coming in and loosing the will to continue due to the dance.

Once again; "I do not intend to do this!". I love a fair fight.

Some very good points so far. And some spamm as always

Of course Negative SEO will work but how hard it is depends on the site you want to affect. If it is new then it is easy, blast with comments or profile links, job done!!

Otherwise it will take a little more work. Also if you are jumping around from 20-50 you are going to try to attack 20-50 sites and I am sure you will agree this is going to be too much and surely not worth your while.

Believe it or NOT, some people check rankings to catch new sites (competitors...) and spam the hell out of them. Guess what? They drop like flies. Thing is, Google loves new sites and they give them a push to the top for some weeks - this is easily identifiable. Some of these guys run tools to catch new urls, and if it's new, babum...

In one of my niches, I have about 100,000 competitors. Can you spare half a million bucks to get rid of them for me?

You said in your post that you dont intend on trying to hurt anyone, so I will take the question as hypothetical.

But for those whos mission it is to 'hurt' a competitors site rankings, I would like to offer a few things to consider:

Remember, you most likely at one time in your life had a 'brand new site', and knew almost nothing about seo. Keeping that in mind, remember how it felt to have a new site, the anticipation, and the happy glow you felt that it was out in the public, and that day you felt great that it finally made it to page 1.. remember that feeling?

Now, how would it feel to have a competitor go and spam a million links to your site, and have all your hard work and dreams disappear in a puff of smoke?

Ok, now that I got that out, remember this.. if your focus and energy is going into trying to bring other sites down, rather than improving your site, then thats all you are going to be.. is that how you want to think of yourself, as someone who feels the need to destroy other sites just to get your site up a few notches? Pathetic if you ask me.

Also, there is a little thing called Karma, you know.. what goes around comes around. So, do unto others what they have done unto you, live and let live, and all that jazz.

</soapbox>

I think you've successfully given both me and your competitors a headache already, just by spelling pyramid that way in your thread title.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh... the pain

In my experience, cheap or spammy links in a situation like this would just be ignored by Google. There was a time when you could hit a competitor with 50,000 backlinks in a day and they would get sandboxed. Those days are over from what I've seen.

At $5 that will cost you approx. $100 - $500 just to test.

Then you have the problem of people at positions 101 - 1,000 passing you in the SERPs.

You going to buy links for everyone that has a page ranked in the SERPs for your keyword, must be a good keyword?