Is artificially inflated DA/DR hurtful?

I am thinking of artificially inflating my DA/DR for a new site in order to defend my long term keyword pages to competitor. I am thinking that if they are doing research in Semrush/Ahrefs and see that my page have a high-ish DA/DR, they will not even try to target that specific keyword and look for easier ones.

Is there any risk with this? Will Google slap me on the wrist for inflating my DR/DA artificially? Anyone that has done the same and can give some insight?

Yes , doing this would cause you an long term mess , I had done with some of my pbns , still they are having zero traffic , they are hit by google tho !

Hawkeye Digital said:

Yes , doing this would cause you an long term mess , I had done with some of my pbns , still they are having zero traffic , they are hit by google tho !

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So this would (in theory) mean that if you want to impose negative SEO on your competitors, you could just inflate their DA/DR artificially?

bitanga said:

So this would (in theory) mean that if you want to impose negative SEO on your competitors, you could just inflate their DA/DR artificially?

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yes but mate , thats bad ! I would never outrank them with these tactics , rather getting more quality backlinks would do the work !

Of course. But that also means that someone could easily do that to you or to me if they want to be mean. In high competitive niches, people are willing to sell the firstborn to reach #1.

Depende on how you do it. There are many harmless options to increase DR and DA. Blasting your site to increase, will do a lot of harm, but classic redirections method is 100% harmless (although it's not working in Ahrefs lately as good as it used to)

It's detrimental to any site in the long run
Google can catch up one way or the other

With some projects it can benefit but if you are doing it for organic views, it is useless.

I don't see it hurting you if you're using it to get high-value link partners.

Think of this as a form of social proof on social media.

There's a reason why people buy Facebook likes and Instagram video views and other forms of social proof.

People are more likely to take you seriously if you give them reasons to think that you already have an organic following.

The problem is that if you just got started, nobody would want to partner with you.

So it's a classic chicken-or-egg problem.

People fix this by using SMM panels.

The same applies to people who inflate their DA so they can get better link partners.

The problem is if you try to get a deal with people who know what they're doing, they can share the word about your artificially inflated DA.

This can ruin your chances of getting links from other high-quality sources.

The good news is that you don't have to artificially inflate your domain authority.

As long as you're patient, if you target less competitive keywords that don't appear on SEMrush but do appear on Google autocomplete results, you can quickly increase your DA in a completely organic way.

Please understand that any tweaking or any shortcuts you take will eventually come back to haunt you.

I know that's not the kind of message you want to hear, especially on this forum.

But it's also the truth!

You just have to be as organic as possible, and this all boils down to being more conscientious about the intent behind the keywords you are targeting.

This is how you deliver solid value to search engine users.