Is it common practice for 1 business to hire "black hat" services to a competitor? Particularly the type of services that would get them penalised.
I'm thinking about Social Media too, like buying 1,000s of fake followers so the account gets banned.
In fiercely competitive markets I would expect this is really common.
1. how does a business protect itself against this kind of "attack"?
2. what risk does a business take on from competing in this manner?
3. is this a common thing?
I dont sell these services so take this with a grain of salt.
1. It is hard to protect from, you can block bot attacks on your own site but not really on social media.
2. You risk kicking a hornets nest as if other businesses become aware of wide spread foul play,
they might become upset and also fire random shots around. If you are one of a few tight competitors then
one might see it worth the money to try and hit everyone. If you own a website that already has a lot of established links,
then it is harder to take down. But if you are small, they can take you down with a simple fiver gig.
Your social medias will usually be sitting ducks. But you can just be prepared to ask your followers to move over whenever you
think the malicious attacks are over (people often get bored when attacking especially when no response
is being sent back to statisfy their need to see someone suffer.
3. I personally say it is rather uncommon, sort of an unspoken rule for most people not to go crazy on
each other when all your assets are lay bare.
When you are the small person compared to your competitors, they likely wont notice you existing
or care about you enough to knock you down. Usually by the time you become one of the main
competitors in any area, your numbers would be big enough that someone would need to spend much more
time or money to ensure you go down. The level of grudge they would need to even follow through if you
are too big to take down easily, should not be a level easy to give them.
In some niches, it is filled with more people who are morally............ not bothered, and it can be more likely to get negative
attacks as they do not see a "problem" with some of these behaviours.
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Also, many times in a lot of these online businesses.......... the "benefit" you can get by taking down a competitor is
near minimal. If you take down someones instagram account, this DOES NOT mean much of their followers will go to you.
If you take down someones website, you are not gauranteed to go up one spot in google across enough
keywords for it to be worth it.
In fact many times on social media, your competitors actually help you by keeping your followers engaged while you sleep.
It is the whole network working together to farm engagement is the whole reason you even have a good chance to
get yourself in front of many people. Competitors often test out new viral things and methods for you that make
copying the winning formula easier.
TLDR:
This is a thing that occurs, but as a whole, the likelyhood of it randomly happening to you out of the thousands of people
doing the same business model is low. The chances of it happening increased the more people you piss off.
By the time most people become a "target" they are already too big to be easily taken down.
