Blackhat Linkbombing To Hurt Your Competitors New Website?
SEO General December 31st. 2007, 1:32amLet me start off by saying that I do not condone using this type of technique by any means. This is an article around learning the darker side of search engine marketing, since we do not see many articles related to it. Many people ask about black hat marketing methods and techniques, this can be considered a very black hat method.
As we all know, backlinks are essential in a marketing campaign for any website. The more relevant backlinks you have to your site, the better it is for your SERP’s. So let’s say you have just finished up your new website and are looking to start promoting it to the general public. You could start with simple forum signature links, paid directory submissions to high profile directories such as Best Of The Web, use Yahoo Answer’s by replaying to questions in the same category as your website, or just buy text links. There are several other ways to start building backlinks to your site, but those can be covered in another article. The problem can arise for you if you gain too many backlinks in a short amount of time for your website. Since the website is still new, you do not have many backlinks, if any at all.
To the search engines, you are like a small seed waiting to grow. As you get more backlinks, you are in essence watering your seed (no not that way). If you get to many backlinks to fast, that is like taking a huge bucket of water and pouring it on your little seed. As we all know that too much water is a bad thing, and over watering can kill the growth process. So imagine what would happen if you went out and got hundreds and hundreds of backlinks each day to your new site. Yes you guessed it, you can hurt your new website. The search engines will actually penalize your website if you all of a sudden starting showing all these backlinks very quickly.
Now take the over watering technique and apply that to a competitors new website. The same thing will happen to there site, to many backlinks in a short amount of time and they will get penalized in no time. I do not think that this would work on a well established website since the site has been around for years and has built the authority and backlink numbers already. What good is a few hundred links a day going to do to a site that already has hundreds of thousands?
There are two pieces of software that I can think of that would be able to accomplish this task for you with very little work. Xrumer and Prosubmitter are tools used to auto submit your website URLS to forums, blogs, message boards etc. automatically. These are not your typical run of the mill programs and can seriously harm your site if abused.
Xrumer works with several popular forums, it can auto create the account (breaks almost all security measures, captcha, word text, javascript and even email verification) and post messages for you. Even after you post a message with the URL, it can then go back to the same forum, create another account and post a following up bogus message to your original thread. Yes this software is pretty damn evil, it is multi threaded and can run on proxy servers. There are more in depth features of the program, but this should give you a general idea as to what it does and how it operates. So take either of these two, run them for a week straight on your competitors new website and I bet within a few weeks you will see the penalized results.
I had always thought that the SERP’s could not be manipulated on Google, Yahoo or MSN, but this sure sounds like a way to do it to a new website. So how can you protect your new website from someone who could sabotage it from the start? I am still working on answers to that question so I can share them with all of you. If you have idea’s on how to protect your new website from this sort of attack please post a comment and let everyone know.
This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:53 pm
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January 1st, 2008 at 3:15 am
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January 2nd, 2008 at 1:43 am
Good point, But I think its difficulty to kill a site..
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:35 am
people usually dont bother about new websites
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:14 am
Oh I agree it would be hard to kill any site, this was just an idea and I was looking for some feedback. If it is in fact possible to do, then I was trying to find ways to combat this technique.
@seo If your competition launches a new site, you should always bother with it. See what it is they are doing, find out what they are trying to target and where there links are coming from. You always research what the competition is doing, this is a rule for any SEO campaign.
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Um why bother with this method that may work… with the new paid link algo just go buy a bunch of links for your competitors and IMO, you can kill any site. That is the worst part of Googles slapdown. For the first time ever in my 14 years of watching engines an engine has made it possible to kill a competitor by opointing links at them. IMO, whacked and definitely in need of further consideration!
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Terry you took the pen out of my hands, the next post I am working on entails exactly what you have mentioned. Google has dug themselves a hole on how they use links as a measuring stick for the SERP’s. Now they are trying to reverse the chaos that they have caused by trying to target paid links and penalize the sites that are buying them. It is another can of worms they have opened up.
January 4th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Hey Guys.
Matt Cutts recently stated that sites buying links were not the biggest targets of the paid links debate. It is the sites that are “selling PageRank” that are the focus of this new ranking filter.
This comment was recently posted on Sphinn and caused more debate for the crowd. He has also stated that it would be impossible to bring down someones web site by link bombing a competitor. I have never seen an instance where something like this has happened. I do know that Google now “discounts” large numbers of back links that do not look natural. There is not necessarily a penalty involved, they simply do not exist as far as Google is concerned.
I have seen this with a large client who went on an automated article writing campaign. This company had developed over 2K back links through daily (8 hour a day) article submissions. Several months later, those links disappeared in their Google Webmaster account. Their rankings stayed the same and actually increased in the following weeks due to the SEO campaign that was implemented.
February 9th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
have seen this kind of thing temporarily bomb a site in SERPS from massive sitewides like webbieworld. it doesnt usually last long, and in general, would building many thousands of links for a competitor be a good plan in the long term?
i think id rather use the technoolgy sparingly on my sites
February 10th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Keep in mind if it is a new website and you get hundreds of backlinks on a weekly basis you will not be helping anyone out at all. Do this for several weeks and there site will have one hell of a hard time achieving any decent rankings. However using it sparingly on your own sites would not be a bad idea either. Going overboard however can kill your SERP’s as you will have gained to many links in a short amount of time.