8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site

ompetition on the web is fierce and getting more ruthless by the day. Some webmasters have resorted to using dirty tricks, known as “Google bowling,” to sabotage competing websites. Arm yourself with knowledge and protect your site from these techniques that may be used to undermine your site's reputation.

Who's That Annoying Spammer?

Leaving thoughtful comments on blogs that relate to your site is an effective way to build your online reputation and develop relationships with other webmasters. Of course, leaving spammy comments will have the opposite effect, leading webmasters and Google spiders to believe that you're exploiting them. A competitor can use a spam script that will leave your URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This will diminish the quality of your backlink footprint as well as damage your professional reputation.
Getting Your Domain Banned in Social Media:

Popular social media sites are increasingly advanced at filtering out spam. Netscape doesn't hesitate to ban URLs that it regards as spammy, and while Digg and Reddit are more reluctant to ban a URL, they generally make it impossible for flagged URLs to see any traffic. Unfortunately, it's fairly simple for competitors to sabotage your domains simply by creating a username and repeatedly submitting your worst content. They can accelerate the process by registering a few accounts at each site using the same IP and then voting for your content using their multiple accounts. Most social media sites will think that you're trying to artificially promote your content and automatically flag or ban your domain from their system.
Spammy Link Buying:

There are a number of terrible link farms left over from the nineties that every search engine has flagged as major spam producers. By submitting your site to these link farms, a competitor can destroy the quality of your backlink footprint, and thus lower your trust ranking. This trust ranking determines how high you end up in the search engine results.If your competitor wants to take it one step farther and try to ban your site from Google's rankings altogether, they can report you for engaging in link buying, even though they bought the links themselves.
Duplicate Content:

Google is smart enough to recognize and filter out duplicate content, only ranking one version. Unfortunately, the search engine can't always tell which website the content originally came from. As a consequence, a shrewd competitor can keep a regular eye on your site using an RSS, and as soon as you post something new, rip off your content and post an identical version on their own site. If Google indexes your competitor's version as the original, you'll miss out on rankings and possibly have your backlink footprint damaged, as Google recognizes duplicate content as an indicator for probable spam sites. If your site is newer or has a low Page Rank, you're especially vulnerable to this type of sabotage, as Google is more likely to rank established sites instead of yours.
301/302 Hijacking:

A 301 redirect is a piece of code placed on a page by a webmaster that tells search engines and visitors that the page has moved to a new location. A 301 redirect is a legitimate webmaster technique which is useful, for instance, if you have bought a new domain and would like to move your property over. Unfortunately, a 301 redirect can also be used by competitors to sabotage your ranking. By hacking your site and redirecting your pages to theirs, they can steal both your traffic and your search engine ranking. If you're dealing with a savvy competitor, they might only redirect some of your older archived pages so that you may not even notice the hijack for quite some time.

While a 301 hijack involves actually hacking your site, a 302 hijack can be accomplished without access to your site. 302 Hijacking is less about permanent Google ranking and more about stealing temporary traffic. A 302 redirect is a piece of code that tells search engines that a page has been temporarily moved, but that it will eventually be moved back to the original location. With a 302 redirect, a competitor's site will show up in Google and MSN search engine rankings instead of yours. A shrewd competitor can put 302 redirects on their pages that point to yours. When your page shows up in the search engines, some of the time the visitors will be redirected to your competitor's site, as Google and MSN mistakenly identify their site as the original.
Denial of service (DOS) attack:

A DOS attack is one of the oldest and most illegal online sabotage techniques. Essentially, a competitor overwhelms your server with external communications requests so that it is forced to reset, or it simply cannot serve up pages to legitimate visitors. A well timed DOS attack, particularly one staged during a promotional campaign, can kill your momentum and rob you of quality traffic. DOS attacks take a number of widely varied forms, but because they are so clearly illegal and easy to prosecute, you won't find many competitors in the western world who regularly engage in this sort of sabotage.
Kicked Out of AdSense:

Google AdSense is, for many webmasters, the primary source of income from their site. Given its importance, it's rather surprising how easily a malicious competitor can get you banned with a click attack campaign. By simply going to your pages and clicking on ads repeatedly, your competitor will trigger a flag to Google that the advertising clicks you've received are illegitimate. Google assumes that you're trying to artificially increase your own payout, and will often ban users with this sort of action without warning. While Google has a form which allows you to report the attack, many victims report that their inquiries are ignored and their accounts remain banned, despite reporting the incident.
Click Fraud:

On the other end of the advertising sabotage spectrum is click fraud. When you set up AdWords, you calculate your anticipated conversion percentage and price your bid accordingly. However, a competitor can dramatically lower your conversion percentage by clicking on your campaign repeatedly. You'll pay for the increased clicks, but your conversions stay the same, resulting in a campaign that becomes unprofitable. Often, this is the work of competitors who are bidding on the same keywords. They generally want to eliminate a competitor by raising their costs and lowering or eliminating their campaign profits in order to make participation unsustainable.

Although you may feel helpless against these attacks, victims of sabotage have the law on their side. Many of these 8 methods are explicitly illegal under US law. Those that aren't still fall under the umbrella of bad faith or deceptive trade practices, both of which will provide you with legal recourse. Of course, it is difficult if not impossible to exact legal revenge upon a saboteur outside the US, and fraud campaigns can hurt whether you win legally or not, so it's important for webmasters to be proactive about protecting their properties.