I just stumbled on one very interesting essay in the Forbes Magazine titled The Saboteurs Of Search which I find quite interesting considering it somehow answers some serious SEO questions about spam and possible penalization for your or competitor website.
Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling urls onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and manufacture our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an concept than it is in practice.”
Cutts additionally points out that any potential for sabotage exists across all search engines. “It really should be called ’search engine bowling,’ ” he says.
I’m not certain what that will lead, but most definitely will form some citizens try cyber terrorism and buy some poor neighbourhood urls for their competition and see what happens. I already stumbled across few threads on DP where public were looking for adult related urls and similar to point to their competitors.
Now Matt doesn’t really say what will be the punishment and how harsh it will be particularly after the fact that they know that technique can be used on competitors and is a way of cyber terrorism, but we can most definitely observe and listen to what’s happening around us and whether there is a way to penalize I bet that eventually we will take in someone screaming that lost ranking for no specific reason or got his competitor out.
In reality black hat SEO offers few very interesting techniques that can be easily done to manipulate and punish small to medium sized websites. The easiest way is the direct duplicate composition penalty where the website that has highest pagerank is assumed to be the origin of the composition and basically whether you have higher pr website you can just copy the composition of your targeted website or at least the main pages that are their landing pages, and sit back and watch their rankings drop. The problem with that trick is that you will be clearly identified as the attacker, but whether you got your tracks covered with privacy and pay pal payments there is no problem. (I’m not giving you ideas).
Search Engine Link Spam is clearly the second case, and everyone know that whether they participate in link farming projects they can get penalized.
I’ll bring updates as they come.
Original post by venetsian
