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Forums have been buzzing and buzzing about the possibility of a competitor being able to hurt your Google ranking for the past few years now. We have covered this topic time and time again, just see here for some of the many times we covered it. In fact, we even covered a thread that listed how to penalize your competitors in Google.
I thought it would be fun to see if you guys believe it. Do you think it is possible for someone to hurt a competitors by using links as ammunition. I am not talking about hacking into someone's site. I am talking about just using external links, that a webmaster cannot control, as a method of hurting one's Google rankings. Here is the poll:
There is discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld now. Most feel that, yes, you can hurt someone's ranking in Google with external links.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Jaan Kanellis
05/05/2008 07:30 pm
We have had a lengthy forum post going of late on the same topic at WebProWorld: http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you.html I have always been of the belief that this cannot happen unless done on an enormous scale. I think I am changing my mind. The problem is now-a-days you could simply buy links on your competitors behalf, report them and then that is it.
Pissed Off
05/10/2008 10:05 pm
another way you can be hurt is if you don't have a 301 redirect for the non www to the www, (of course you should have this, but not all do). I have someone throwing up hundreds of unrelated member profils at various forums and they are trying hurt my results by sending all links to http://domain.com instead of http://www.domain.com , i have not seen any hurt just yet, but if was humanly editing my backlinks, i would raise an eyebrow at the some ridiculously looking unrelated spammy BL's.