So the myth is busted: You CAN blast your competitors away from page one.
I read it so often that if that is the case there would be a war everybody blasting everybody... oh well
My theory on how it works is as follows:
- You have X PageRank on a page.
- You link build to X+Y PageRank on a page.
- You get the benefit of Y incrementally over time. not all at once.
- If your stockpile of Y is out of proportion for how X tends to change over time then you get punished to a degree determined by the age of your website.
So the older the site and the more PR it currently has the more difficult it becomes to "blast it out of the SERPs".
You CAN blast a "low PR/new site" out of the SERPs with relative ease (2 to 3 minutes of work and 1-2 days of wait time with the right tool or service.)
You probably can't blast an older site out because for their age the amount of punishment will be too small to make much difference OR for their current PR "excessive back linking" compared to their current standing would unachievable or at least very impractical compared to just improving your standings via other means.
The place where it blows up in your face however is if the new website hangs in there long enough then you're attack becomes their advantage as website Age removes penalty amount over time. You get benefit for 10 months or so but then they get advantage for eternity after that. So depending on the longevity of your goals you might only make things more difficult for yourself in time by trying to "knock the other guy out".
Now if you really want to remove someone then you want to alter their keyword context. Use the wrong keyword context in linking to them. If the niche is "cars" then link to them in the niche of "toy cars" with low volumes of quality back links. Just try to help them rank better somewhere else. If you get the right kinds of authority sites validating the new context it will take an eternity to undo.
Don't forget to alter the URLs too...
http://www.competitor.com/?p=toy-cars
http://www.competitor.com/#toy-cars
etc...
If they don't use canonical tags then this is incredibly potent stuff because if the PR of the spoof URLs exceeds the PR of the original page URLs then original page is deemed a lower PR duplicate content page and goes to the supplemental indexes as all duplicate content pages eventually do. Then as long as the new URLs out rank the old and canonical tags aren't used you can control another site's keyword relevance.
You can further limit your liability by doing this with a new domain you control and 301 redirect to the competitor. Then if they do eventually use canonical tags you undo the link building by removing the redirect.
It's nasty business and will likely get you sued if there is real money involved. I still think it is easier and less risky to improve your own standings instead. If you follow my threads at all you'll notice I tell people left and right to use canonical tags to avoid being targeted with these kinds of attacks. Additionally the canonical tags help you get more of your website's pages indexed by google.
