There have been rumors of such techniques floating around for ages and there are even some black-hat SEO’s that specialize in this type of “link bombing”. The gist of the deal is that you create organically or through purchase ‘bad’ links to your competitor’s websites in hopes of causing their search engine rank position to plummet.
There are a couple of interesting posts floating around about this practice because someone from Google has chimed in on this controversial topic. It is funny how a subject matter can take on a complete different view depending on how you look at it. There are a couple of headlines out there that in my opinion are quite deceiving: “Google Defends Bad Link Theory & Repeats That Competitors Can’t Hurt You” and “Google Debunks Link Sabotage Theories” – In both cases I think the reality is the complete opposite of the titles. Here are the two quotes that made me realize this, “Most of these guidelines involve the content on the site itself, something which generally can’t be changed through links pointing to the site.” To me this means that some of the guidelines refer to incoming links and those can and will affect your site in a negative way. The next quote is even more ominous, “In theory, I can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing website issues I have not once run into a situation like that. Also, I know that if a situation like that were to come to our attention, it would be resolved very quickly.” This last one tells me that it is possible and because of stiff competition I believe it is even likely. Sure, if it comes to their attention that it is being done it can be resolved but it might never come to their attention, right?
Bottom line is that it is very unfair that something beyond your control should affect your website’s ranking. Especially when it is so easy for a competitor to use these techniques to harm your site. I am also guessing that the occurrence of this type of black-hat technique is much more prevalent than anyone knows. After all, a few positions in Google ranking for popular keywords can means 10’s of thousands of dollars to some businesses.