High search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Search can help you to get a lot of traffic and customers. High search engine rankings are limited resources. Imagine only 10 web pages or websites can be listed on page 1 of the search engine result pages. If your website has high rankings for a good keyword or phrase then your website will get a lot of attention.
Your competitors also understand this theory and try too compete with you. Some of them might not use ethical business practices. The are a few points you should be aware that your competitors might use them to hurt your search engine rankings.
#1 Your Competitors Might Create Spam Under Your Name
Search engines are using links as one of the important elements to calculate the ranking of web pages. The number of links and quality of the content are both important in the algorithm. Your competitors can easily add your website to several spam site which can hurt your search engine rankings. Besides, your website URL can be used for spamming in forums, social networks and blog comments. All of these unethical techniques not only hurt your rankings but also affected your online reputation.
#2 Your Competitors Might Peach On You
Google doesn’t like paid links. If Google knows you are buying links to improve search engine rankings, your websites are likely to be banned or penalized heavily. Same thing can be applied to hidden text and cloaking techniques. If your competitors find out and inform Google, then your search engine rankings will be affected.
Personally, I don’t like buying links because the risk is much more bigger than what it worth. One thing to take note is if you are buying advertisements which link to your website, it is better to include a nofollow link attribute on the advertisement itself because search engine will not parse the link and simply ignore it.
#3 Your Competitors Might Send A Copyright Complaint
If your competitors notified search engine about a copyright infringement on your website then they must remove your website from its index for 10 days according. If your competitors files a copyright complaint against you then your website will be temporarily or permanently removed from the search engine results. You should make sure you use original content on your websites to prevent such case to happen. It will seriously affect your business if you are not alert of it.
#4 Your Competitors Might Create Duplicate Content
Search engines hate duplicate content. If there is more than one web page having same content then search engines will detect it and pick one of them and drop the rest. If you are facing this issue, the duplicate content created by your competitors might have better ranking than your original content. Duplicate content has been a hot issue for quite a few years. But until now, there is no fix solution to resolve this issue if the duplicate content is created by somebody else. Google has released a new tag which is canonical link tag to resolve the duplicate content issue which you have the control.
Conclusion
You cannot totally avoid those unethical competitors spam under your name. You can avoid your websites being banned from search engines by only using ethical search engine optimization techniques. In addition, unethical SEO methods can hurt your reputations in the industry if other people or your competitors know about it.
Although we don’t have a fix solution, ethical SEO is the only way for you to build up reputation and survive longer if you wish to.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
While I have good faith that many competitors will not ruin your name through spamming your link in forums (although that’s possible, if they’re getting overzealous), duplication of content is perfectly possible – and easy! What they’ll need is just a bot to copy your content and plaster it all over their blogs. I’ve been a victim of plagiarism once but it wasn’t because of a bot, but more of the person tries too painfully to be like me – he actually copy and pasted a handful of my posts, and since I have hotlink protection enabled for images, downloaded them and uploaded them to his own account.
For a blogger who is aware of copyright infringement and the damages of it, I think we will, by hook or by crook, avoid plagiarizing the content of other sides (which will make other authors file a copyright infringement complaint against us).
Thanks for the informative post!
p/s: Did a little digging around and discovered from your About page that you’re an NTU graduate! Hello there, senior
@Teddy,
Thanks for your great comments. You already graduated from NTU or still studying? I graduated from Computer Engineering, how about you? Keep in touch.
Some good points to take into consideration, unfortunately the web is a big place and there will always be those who try to take advantage of its weaknesses. I have always advocated shared content as a means to greater visability but I do insist on leaving at least one link back to the original author. The sites that I detest the most are so called scraper sites who add absolutely no value at all to the discussion.
Thanks for shedding light on these pitfalls, every one should be aware of them.
Wow! Nice post. Something new to learn.
But I think you should not have given the first point. Many will now learn about it. Some might use that method. It is very bad.
@Agent 001,
Understand your concern. Actually my original purpose is to make you aware that there are such activities.
@Bey Luen: I am in year one… still very, very far away from graduation! Teehee. Majoring in biological science, so far it’s a pretty boring course but ah wells, it’s supposed to be
Wow.. I’m gonna be more careful and use your tips.. Thanks Ben..
By the way,, feel free to visit in-gadgets.blogspot.com
Wow, this is amazing stuff to learn. I have been facing a spamming problem since July, 2008. I am being target of a stalker guy that is upset when we helped his x g/f get away from him. He has since been sending our website submit form 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 fake quotes, etc. Using many other methods to get our site on a blacklist. We had very high ranking for Phoenix Movers in Google at that time but now drop to the 7th page. We have tried the FBI and other sources. We believe we are getting somewhere now. We will be seeing the Attorney General next week. We know who the guy is. Thank you very much for this valuable information.
@Frontier,
It’s sad to hear that your ranking drop to 7th page. I hope you can resolve your issue soon. Feel free to contact me if you got any question about SEO.
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