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Damaging a Competitor's Ranking is Possible
By Ross Dunn (c) 2007

A June 28th article by Forbes magazine called "The Saboteurs of
Search" (http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/
negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html) discusses
"negative SEO" which is best described as purposely disrupting
competitor rankings. The article has caused waves in the SEO
industry as marketers debate the effectiveness of the noted
tactics.

From my point of view and experience these tactics are employed
and I know there is a serious market for negative SEO because I
have personally been asked to offer the service many times in
the past. StepForth, however, does not offer negative SEO
services with the exception of Google Insulation noted below;
which we have previously use to help clients defend themselves
against negative publicity appearing in rankings.

What are the Tactics of Negative SEO?

There were several tactics mentioned: Google Bowling, Tattling,
Google Insulation, Copyright Takedown Notices, Copied Content,
Denial of Service, and Click Fraud.

* Google Bowling: XYZ is dropped off the search engines
because their competitor framed them for breaking Google's
guidelines in an extreme manner. An example would be to create,
overnight, a 1000% more links for a competitor (than they
already have). The key would be to produce so many links at once
that Google's spam trigger would have no choice but to catch
it. There are various ways to increase the chances of this
happening, but I would rather not describe them - after all
this is not a tutorial.

* Tattling: Is XYZ (the competitor) doing well because they
purchased links? If so, and it is something you can prove, then
it is entirely within your right to tell Google using their spam
report form.

But will this work? It is touch and go whether your complaint
will actually do anything in the short term because Google often
collects these complaints and then upgrades its algorithm (if
possible) to clean out other offenders using the same techniques;
a more efficient process. That said, as Matt Cutts said in this
video about link buying (http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2007/06/
google-cracks-down-on-link-buying.php) Google is not above
occasionally using manual methods to clean out spam so you might
get lucky and see an immediate result.

* Google Insulation: Is there negative press in the top 10
about your service? Perhaps you have a competitor that just
won't budge out of a top position? In either case a Google
Insulation strategy is designed to raise the rankings of other
websites that positively discuss your company/services/products
in order to oust competitors out of the top 10 rankings. In its
raw concept I believe this tactic is ethical because it is smart
competitive marketing and a great tactic for reputation
management (a hot topic these days).

* Copyright Takedown Notices: If a person desperately needed
to drop a competitor out of a top position it could engage in a
legal action that requires Google to drop the ranking for a
period of time based on copyright infringement. The problem
here, of course, is that this tactic exposes the perpetrator so
that they can be sued by the offended company if the accusation
is baseless. Here is where you can submit a copyright
infringement notice to Google (http://www.google.com/support/bin/
request.py?form_type=user&stage=fm&user_type=user&contact_type=
alert_legal&continue=Continue).

* Copied Content: Due to the fallible nature of Google's
algorithm it is possible to 'steal' away the traffic to a
competitor's particular content (say an article just published)
by publishing it on your own site IF your site is more
entrenched than the competitor's.

You see if Google is presented with two websites which
have the same content it will be forced to choose which site is
the original creator. The website with the longer history and/or
the highest reputation will often win out and the loser will
often find their content ranks lower (if at all).

* Denial of Service: This is the most evil and clearly
illegal tactic for removing a competitor. Denial of service
attacks (DoS) are conducted by sending a large number requests
to a competitor's web server at one time. The result is the
competitor's server will either be too jammed with requests to
function properly or it will simply crash from the burden of so
many requests - effectively taking the competitor's website
offline. Evil indeed.

* Click Fraud: Click fraud is no different than stealing
money from a competitor. This is how it works: people
maliciously click on ads to purposely eat away at a
competitor's ad budget; even on a small scale this can be
damaging to a competitor. The most aggressive click fraud is
when a network of computers with specially created software is
used to maliciously click on a competitor's pay per click
advertisements in order to waste their money and destroy their
advertising campaign.

Should You Be Worried this is Happening to You?

It is highly unlikely that the negative SEO techniques above
have been or ever will be used against you. If, however, it does
appear to be happening to you then contact us or another
reputable web marketing company. At StepForth we will see what
we can do about reversing the effects by contacting the proper
people or conducting a negating clean-up campaign.

Additional Notes on Click Fraud

The one issue that you could very likely suffer from is click
fraud but not in the way you might imagine. You see click fraud
appears to happen indiscriminately so just about anyone can have
it happen to them; in my experience it is not often a targeted
action. As a result, you should be keeping an eye out for it if
you are actively using pay per click marketing.

So how can you detect click fraud? The best way for me to answer
this is to tell you what we use to monitor campaigns and detect
click fraud: ClickTracks Professional. ClickTracks Professional
(http://stats.stepforth.com/) is a website analytics program that
(among other amazing things) compares the data it collects from
visitors on your website with the data you get from your pay per
click campaign and does a pretty good job of identifying
suspicious click-through behavior.

If ClickTracks Professional determines there is a high
probability of click fraud in your campaign you will be
presented with a detailed report you can take to your agent at
the search engine you are marketing with. If your search engine
agent determines there is validity to the evidence it is likely
you will get a refund or credit to your account.

Now for a little plug, I liked ClickTracks Professional so much
that in 2003 StepForth purchased our own copy and we offer
website accounts for as little as $150 per month which is 50%
cheaper than the service that ClickTracks.com provides. If you
are interested just check out http://stats.stepforth.com where
we provide more detail and a service comparison chart.

NOTE: I had to think long and hard before publishing this post
because I find many of the methods of damaging a competitor's
rankings horrifically unethical. That said, I believe that
understanding these tactics is important in order to identify
their use if they are applied against you.
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Ross Dunn is the founder and CEO of StepForth Placement Inc.
(http://www.stepforth.com/). Celebrating its tenth year in
operation, StepForth is one of the oldest and most trusted names
in search engine optimization and web marketing.
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