Ever tried backlinking to competitor to bury them?

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This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately

There seems to be a lot of differing opinions and experience regarding building links, and some people feel that building the wrong kind of links can have negative effect on SEO efforts.

Myself, I'm on the fence here, not sure what to think yet until I gain some more experience.

If it is possible to lose rankings due to poor backlinking methods, why aren't people blasting tough competitor sites with thousands of spam comments (just as an example) using some of the usual suspect software to do so?

Has anybody ever tried to knock a competitor out of the SERPS by blasting their sites with a bunch of supposedly lousy links, with any sort of results?

I'm really curious if anybody really has every tried this. I myself haven't. But I'm thinking about trying it once to see what happens.

I run across a lot of thin affiliate sites that rank well when I'm doing keyword/niche research, and I'm considering maybe just taking one of those sites I've recently run across and blasting it with some mass links, just to see what happens.
#search engine optimization #backlinking #bury #competitor
  • I've never done this to competition, but I will say that my experience with this is that it only really hurts brand new sites with young domains. More established domains seem to not be hurt by this tactic.
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    • Incorrect. This is a prevailing myth that seems to have massive hold on a lot of internet marketers. When a brand new site with massive money behind it does a launch, it will get thousands, if not tens of thousands of backlinks, virtually over night.

      According to this urban SEO legend, this would instantly get it sandboxed with Google. But again, that's not how it works.

      No, you can't hurt your competition by giving them any sort of, or number of backlinks.

      If you really want to go to the proverbial Google Sandbox, just launch a new site on a new domain, fill it with duplicated content, and then keep adding that exact same content to multiple pages. That'll get ya there. But not backlinking.
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  • @Tom Johnson

    I beg to differ. Have you actually tested this yourself? because I have and I would strongly agree with kadesmith.
  • This, according to Google:

    The bolded, underlined red "" is bolded and underlined and made red by me, of course, but the word is Google's.

    "Almost nothing" means, of course, "something." ... At least they admit to it.
  • The reason you can't hurt a competitor is that if he is a competitor you want to hurt its because he is ALREADY ranking with links. Think about it. That is an entirely different scenario than starting a new site that is brand new to Google. I wouldn't say you could hurt a new site either (depends on things we may not know) but I do know Google doesn't really care about brand new sites
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    • That's a really good point, I hadn't thought of it that way - if they're already ranking well enough to be competition they're already doing something well that would be hard to counterbalance or negate
  • I would think it is far more fruitful to take that sort of backlinking energy and focus it on your own site. The best way to win is to do the things your competitor does and do more of them for longer. Most companies once they get well ranked slack off.

    Besides, sending bad links to your competitor is bad mojo. Nothing good will come of it ;-)
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    • Actually it can be very profitable. Imagine if you website makes $10,000 per month in the #2 slot. And if you moved to #1 you would make $40,000 per month. So it is worth spending $30,000 per month in trying to kill your competitors website, while at the same time boosting your own.
  • Backlinking to your competition will never hurt their rankings; it will only improve them.
  • There are a lot of misconceptions here. I'd suggest you all study the adult niche. Nuking competitor's sites is a weekly occurrence.
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    • How do they do it? Everybody there already lives in a "bad" neighborhood.
  • It is possible, I read a case study of a person doing it. But it is more difficult because if its not done correctly (99.9% of people do it incorrectly) then you just wasted time/effort and money.
  • Can IT be done?

    Sometimes YES, sometimes NO.

    Different sites, different domain age, different markets, different IP's... so many stuff decide IF a site can be "broken" or not... anyways, WF is not the place to discuss this IMO.

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    • I prefer to put all my energy on building my own site strong instead of hurting my competitors !
  • Just stick with your own site if your want to spam links. Just wait until your site hits puberty to do so. Meaning wait at LEAST 3-6 months.
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    • all the myths on so-called backlink penalties are a joke, and they are a joke for this very reason. You can do it all to your competition and if the myths were true you could destroy your competition. But its all BS.
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  • I wish that Google had a rule about too many links, too quickly being a problem.

    Case in point in my niche....the NY Times launches it's wine club via press release and article in the paper. They use an independent company to run the thing for them and likely spend less than a day setting it up.

    The result? 6k bloggers mention the launch....and they're sitting in the #3 position for a competitive term.

    Must be nice
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • @Mike Grant

    I'm not hinting what you're saying isn't true but would you mind linking anything to prove this? I mean, you say "study the adult niche" but it's not exactly easy to search for anything in the adult niche.
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