John Mueller from Google said that bulk-generating fake URLs of your competitor's site should not lead to negative SEO and ranking issues for that site. "This is not something I'd worry about," he added.
Mike Blazer asked John, "Bulk generate non-existing URLs on a competitor's site that lead to 5XX server errors when opened. Googlebot sees that a substantial number of pages on that domain return 5XX, the server is unable to handle requests. Google reduces the page #crawl frequency for that domain."
John replied on Mastodon saying, "I can't imagine that having any effect. This is not something I'd worry about."
Here is a screenshot of this conversation:
Do you agree?
Forum discussion at Mastodon.
