ROCKFUSE: Blogging Tips

Is Your Website Vulnerable to Attack From Competitors on Google

Posted: 19 Jul 2011 11:38 PM PDT

At the end of 2010 there was a lot of people claiming that their websites were being harmed on Google for rank by using black seo techniques such as xrumer and comment spamming. Not only were they being harmed in the short term from such actions but now their ranking dropped for longer and longer periods of time, some even claiming their sites never even came back to rank well again. We at Rockfuse decided to experiment and find out was this just typical Google dance and algorithm updates or was there a real issue with Google blacklisting sites for using these techniques. The important factor was not that one could get in trouble for black seo techniques but a competitor could attack your website using this technique and there is nothing you could do. The answer has been eye opening , though we cannot of course prove indefinitely that this is what going on , but based on our experiment it is and quite it quite frightening.

Google has always claimed and continues to claim that there is almost nothing that a competitor can do to you that will harm your rank or get you banned. I have always believe this and have never had any of my sites have a permanent penalty or have any of my sites de indexed, that is until now. I want to first say please do not do this to your competitors and please do not misuse this information. This is all strictly in our opinions concluded from our experiments. If you have suffered from a similar experience we welcome you to share it with us. Also invite you to do the same experiment on your own websites and domains.

The experiment. We decided to use 3 domains. One was a blog that has been around for 5 years and ranked well for some keywords and made money. This was going to be a sacrifice. But the blog was no longer being updated and was one of the fashion blogs I had. So most of the blog content was mostly product review and fashion news. All white hat all white haat seo. The other two websites were local business domains that I had. Each business were for carpet cleaning. They too were on wordpress blog format but filled to look like a local business. These were several year old domains that I picked up a few years ago but was not using or leasing. They were in big markets and ranked in the top ten for carpet cleaning and the city they were in . These two domains and sites were all white hat seo and marketing. They were not used , just placement text and info. They would have been good flipper sites or lease sites.

Now that we had the domains and websites we decided to start doing tradition grey hat / black hat techniques that are pretty popular these days among typical IM and Seo people. The first thing we did was to hire someone to do several xrumer runs for each domain for keywords you would aim for. Xrumer is a program used by spammers to fill out profiles on forums and fill them with their backlinks, they sometimes use the program to make posts but usually stick to just creating forum profiles. This of course brought a sudden surge upwards in serps but was later followed by a giant bounce down. Fine, typical of any large backlink strategy where over optimization gets you a penalty filter, sometimes called google dance, -50, goop, etc. These penalties lasted any where between 3 weeks and 2 month. Once the sites started coming back we started running spam commenting. Spam commenting is when people go from blog to blog usually through an automation program and submit spammy comments to blogs. They can be hundreds to tens of thousands at a time. We then followed it up with another run of xrumer and more comment spamming. Finally we ran article directories submissions and some more profile creations and forum posting. We did several rounds of this with the most going to the blog.

So we then sat back and waited. There was the typical surge upward followed by a large drop. So we waited and waited and waited. There was a temporary bounce up to some traffic and then a drop back , with each drop back got worse and worse. Then it happened in may the blog site was de indexed. Nothing was done to the site other than the backlinking. So we went ahead and requested a reconsideration. Denied. We removed some of the backlinks what we could reconsideration again denied. We though well maybe because of Panda there was some issue with site structure , onsite backlinks , affiliate links etc. We got rid of them all and delete lower quality content off the site and again denied. Then we decided ok lets delete the entire site write a 1000 word article about a subject with no backlinks, no ads, nothing . Just high quality content did another reconsideration and nothing, denied again. So the site has now stands with nothing but one high quality article with 0 backlinks , ads, etc, and Google continues to deny the reconsideration requests. The other local businesses are still indexed but have not faired much better. Where once they stood in the top 10 they now rank in the 300s and 400s.

So what is the conclusion to all this ? In our opinion anyone could do this to anyone elses website. If Google has changed their anti spam policy and now punishes website permanently and so drastically from backlinks then no one is safe. We all are vulnerable to such attacks from haters, competitors and so on. The old belief has always been if backlinking could damage you then anyone can go out and damage any competitor and take them down. In the past it has always been hard to believe that such a thing was possible, but it is. You can hurt your competition. All our hiring was done anonymously and by third parties so nothing could be traced to us. The whole experiment was done as if someone from the outside were going to attack our three domains.

The outcome to us is scary and challenging to understand. I believe a much wider experiment needs to be done or more data gathered from similar situations. In order to get a complete picture, but there is no doubt in our minds that this is a true phenomenon that is happening. Only thing that I believe that could protect you would be having a very established site. But, I am not sure. Surely what happened to JCPenny when they were caught by Google for spamming could easily be done to any website using xrumer and other programs, to copy the same outcome and look exactly the same. Its a strange and new scary world out there.

My best advice would to be avoid large scale black hat techniques described above. I believe smaller runs would not harm permanently but larger ones could. I know there are people doing this all the time without penalties. Why maybe better techniques and higher diversity. But this really was no an experiment on how you could get punished for doing it yourself , though its pretty obvious if you do not know what you are doing you can be, but for what could happen if someone wanted to cause your website harm intentionally.

If you have ran into the same problems please let us all know.
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