Not exactly related directly to article, but interesting thought...
After seeing the headlines of Google decimating companies when it finds they used evil black-hat SEO tactics, I wonder whether one could use evil black-hat SEO on a competitor, artificially increasing the sites rankings for a few months, and have the wrath of a Google ban-hammer upon your competitor o_O
Very evil. I wonder if there are companies doing this currently :P
Thoughts?
Sorry if this has been discussed here previously. If so, links please :D
Yep, this is an oft-used argument for why Google might not aim to penalise sites for having spammy backlinks pointing to it.
I think that the recent high profile cases have been a tad more obvious since a bit of research can find that it was indeed that company (or their SEO company..) who built the links.
I'd imagine that in general, Google would aim to simply discount spammy backlinks for the reasons you mention.
Especially since tools like xRumer can build 100,000s of backlinks per day, and various other ones (ScrapeBox etc) can build 10,000s per day...
After seeing the headlines of Google decimating companies when it finds they used evil black-hat SEO tactics, I wonder whether one could use evil black-hat SEO on a competitor, artificially increasing the sites rankings for a few months, and have the wrath of a Google ban-hammer upon your competitor o_O
Very evil. I wonder if there are companies doing this currently :P
Thoughts?
Sorry if this has been discussed here previously. If so, links please :D