Hi, not sure if this has been mentioned before, but is it not possible to use ur competitons web address and get google to flag it up as not good? Like putting it in a link farm etc? I know its a nasty tactic but would that work? My target is debt management, so I need all the help I can get!...lol Thanks
In doing this sort of practice, it can be done. However, it is HIGHLY disrespected, even in the blackhat arena, as it can easily be tracked as to who/how/where/when any posts like that came from. It is also disprespected as a practice due to the point of making it because you deserve it by beating the competitor out as a better marketer/business person, not because you cut them out of the race all together. Now that there are spam, identity theft and other laws in place, it is also recommended to avoid these practices, as to claim you are a representative of such a site or proven making false claims against a business can bring you up on fraud charges in civil and federal court levels, which if you are filed on and fail to appear, the judgement tends to lean in the other parties favor. Bottom line, be a man and don't stoop the cheating rather than legitimate beating.
If you are not capable to be successful in a certain niche... leave it and choose an easier niche, instead of trying to cheat your way up with unethical methods like the one you described. That has nothing to do with black hat whatsoever. Try to focus your creativity on improving your own skills to find smart ways to outrank your competitors and not on finding ways to destroy their business with illegal and/or unethical methods. That is time well spent.
Not that it can't work for little while but that's a practice that is not well looked upon imho. I have never played that game on my competition. I tend to study my competition and learn why they are out ranking me rather than than kick them in the nuts. Getting more familiar with your competition, their strategy, seo and marketing benefits you in the more ways.
Huge xrumer blasts might not work as you expected. Your competitor could be either old enough and would rank even better in serp after such blast, or he might succesfully try to report the blast and convince google that this blast was done not by him. If he's already in blackhat you might try to report him, but this could harm you too as google might check and ban everyone who's doing this in the tops of this niche.
Same thing for me...I think. All of the sudden I have backlinks to all these BS sites that look like shit. My ranking fell like a rock! Now I have to clean it up with better backlinks, I guess
Whats a BS site? I don't think that google will really do something if you are reported. Unless - of course - you are a really bad boy and use stuff like cloaking and massive link rental from unrelated pages. But u would get kicked sooner or later anyway if u do so
Google won't send someone to check on your site. They have spiders that look for predetermined signs of cheating. As for knocking down your competitor, it's the same thing as a price war in offline businesses, and that always goes bad.