ATTN: Ethical issues...

[usbnuts]

To all SEO experts, I don't about u, but I think Internet sites especially small to medium ones are EXTREMELY fragile to unethical SPAM attacks from their competitors. Say, I'm the bad guy. I want to kill off my competitor sites. What can I do? We all know the thing to getting banned by SE is to SPAM search engines. I think a competitor can easily to do this FOR YOU! Do you guys get what I mean?

I can think of several ways to get your site banned. I am bringing up this to tell you how vulnerable we are. I am sure if God guarantees a place in hell for anyone who committed this crime. This is like killing thousands of workhours of SEO.

These are ways to kill sites:
1. Use those check-your-site-rank to SPAM search engine.
2. Submit a URL thousand times hourly to search engine.
3. Put URL in link farm.
4. Clone your competitor's sites, and submit them. Altavista is reportedly to ban them (all of them), because the SE sees this as a way by the original site webmaster to get more pages on AV.

What do you think? Is this just paraonia?

[Mel]

Hi USBnuts:

There is something to what you say, but:

1. I don't think that automated rank checking is going to get your site banned or downgraded.

2. The URL of site submissions is recorded, and it is fairly easy to check where that submission is coming from. In addition it would be a lot of work to submit somone else site thousands of times a day.

3. Putting your competitors URL in a link farm would only be half the battle you would also have to submit those sites to the search engines and hope that they took notice of them.

4. Recently there have been several instances of sites which rank highly on competitive keywords, either mirroring their sites, or cloning pages. I am not aware of the SEs taking any action against these sites.

I think that any responsible SE who has received a submittal from an individual whose URL is in New York months previously suddenly receiving a thousand submissions form someone in Texas, would understand what was happening.

That said I have to agree that there is some possibility of these guerilla type actions having some success, but is there a defense against them?

[JuniorHarris]

I would discount all methods with the exception of the remaining two...link farms and cloning.

Over-use of a web check-your-rank site, would most likely only result with the check-your-rank site being blocked or yourself being blocked from the check-your-rank site. Over submission of URLs may have worked at one time, but the engines are well aware of this tactic and would most likely only result in a block of the submitting IP address.

I can't speak from personal experience regarding cloning, nor am I interested in testing it!~ However, given what I know regarding duplicate content, it very well could be a concern. In a sense, if duplicate content is indexed by the engines it may devalue the original content, or worse yet the bugger now ranks directly below or above you!~ :shocked:

Link farms are another thing. There have been reports of participating sites being dropped, but the engines are getting better at detecting [and ignoring] link farms (which typically have no discernable theme). But let's just go ahead and expand link farming to include link defamation. Link defamation, as in link farming could possibly render a "bad" theme reference simply by it's location or declaration. This could be handy for listing spammers, such as Spammy Site (null()), where Google is very good at recognizing reference links. (For example, those who remember the George Bush SERP on Google).

Our site receives many referrals from Google where the SERP was a result of an inbound link theme. The search term(s) DO NOT appear any where within the site, but were indeed a result of the inbound link theme (based on linking method and some surrounding text).