I was wondering if this would work. There are ways to ping a blog without owning the actual blog. If you were in direct competition with the owner of that blog, could you spam backlinks, list in link farms, set up a continuous ping (once every 1 minute) on their blog, and all the other bad SEO promotion methods to their website to kill the google ranking? I wouldn't know why that wouldn't work, just seeing if anyone knows of any drawbacks from that besides time.