Caveat: I in no way condone the use of the following method for gaining an unfair advantage over your competition or causing their sites any undue hardship. I am vehemently and morally opposed to this method if it is actually put to use. The following method is intended as a satirical parody of what many people do wrong when first building a new website and should be read between the lines as a "what not to do with your own website". But in the spirit of this forum, it is written black hat style.
Having said this though, purely for testing purposes if anyone has a website that they are willing to 'donate' (read: sacrifice) to this test, plus anyone proficient in Xrumer, any volunteers would I'm sure be much appreciated by the BHW community at large to see how Big G is acting at the moment.
The SEO competition killer method
The premise of this method is that Google has recently started sandboxing and de-indexing websites with a lot more rigour in recent times. It was quite easy to gain high SERP rankings even as recently as a year ago, by blasting new sites with a ton of backlinks, sitting back and watching the climb. Recently, many people who use even moderate to reserved backlinking strategies are finding themselves in the sandbox and those who push the limits are even being de-indexed with a lot more regularity. My theory here deviates slightly from the "blast your competition with backlinks and get them de-indexed" theory that has been bantered ad-finitum on this forum, as this is probably more targeted and a little more dirty.
Step One: Identify your targets on page one of SERP
This can be done when doing initial keyword research or in hindsight if you currently have a niche you are trying to rank in.
My theory is that the potential targets for this method will need to be websites that have not yet built history and trust with Google. When doing competition analysis I always look for 'holes' in page one of the SERPS anyway, to make sure I can potentially take that place. If you have competitors with high backlinks and more importantly high domain age, I hypothesise that this method will only work to your detriment if you try it on such sites. An old page (or even a new page) on an old domain already has established history and trust with Google, and any page that is currently ranking with a decent number of backlinks no matter how low their PR/Domain Age etc. have probably already taken a punishment at some stage and are now back in Google's trust books so this method could go either way. Using this method on any of your 'authority' competitors will only cement their place on page one and potentially block you out of the market.
The sites we are interested in 'picking off' here are the newbies. These sites will have a domain age of less than a year or if using Market Samurai, the DA field will be [ - ]. These sites have not yet proven themselves to Google as an authority for your keyword. This method will most likely work for some older sites, but testing must be rigorous, as per step 2 below.
The next thing we want to look for is the PR of their page and then the PR of the top level domain. Ideally your competitor will not yet have any PR, but I would assume that a PR of 1-2 on the ranking page and no more than a PR of 3 on the domain should qualify as a potential target.
Step Two: Assessing Current Backlinks
In this step we want to establish our target's quality of backlinks and 'criminal history' of link building. As I said earlier, if you come across a site that is under a year old that has a ton of backlinks, you can probably assume that they either have already had a punishment previously for this, got very lucky or are consistently building backlinks. On the other hand, you may find your competitor has a very small number of backlinks, but they could also be very targeted, high quality, high PR links.
The first thing we will do here is have a look at our competitors link building history. A simple search on their domain name, using Google's filter of "past 24 hours", "past month" and "past year" should show you how consistently their link building efforts have been and what new backlinks have recently been indexed. If they average out to being quite consistent in their link building, this method may not work. If they have a lot of backlinks but none have appeared recently, then I would say they have probably been punished before and could be liable for another one as a repeat offender. This test is also good if you have targeted an older domain (~2yrs), to find out if they have had no activity in a long time. An older 'dormant' site would not suddenly generate a ton of backlinks out of the blue with no content change, so they are probably in for a slapping if they do.
The next thing we will do is open up backlinkwatch dot com and run a quick test on their current page links. Have a look at the anchor text of the **************** links and see if it has been mixed up or is mainly just your keyword appearing. Have a look at the sites that these links are coming from. If they are relevant, natural high PR links, then this site is has been rewarded with their spot on page one and our character attack may fly in our faces - but if their domain age is less than a year, my current thinking is they will still be punished. If their backlinks are coming from spammy looking pages with lots of OBL, then a repeat offence may give them another penal sentence in the sandbox, even a de-indexing.
Step Three: Blast them with 'dirt'
This step serves to completely discredit your competitors site in the eyes of Google, by not just making them behave unnaturally, but also making them appear as the bottom rung crack whores of internet society.
Spam Time.
We have now qualified our target and it is time for the attack. There are two ways to do this effectively in my opinion. The first way is the manual way. It will be as time consuming as building your own backlinks but a lot more entertaining.
Wear Protection. (I wasn't going to add this part in as it deviates slightly from the 'parody' intent of this method, but if anyone is evil enough to actually try this, for goodness sakes, don't set yourself up for a law suit).
You will want to use a proxy for this part and make sure you are not signed in to any Google services. (If your target notifies any cooperative webmasters, a simple search through their logs will identify your IP - keep it safeguarded).
We will use standard backlink search techniques to identify the most horribly spammed up **************** blog comment pages and use Google search operators to find ones with words like "buy viagra", "acai berry" and some smutty adult keywords. There is no limit to how crazy you can go with this, but a rough guesstimate from my experience with my own sites being sandboxed during tests is that 20 -30 backlinks a week for 2 weeks will do it. Be sure to use *only* your keyword as anchor text and ping each backlink immediately using Pingler, so that the links appear immediately and do not at all look natural to the Big G. Completely halt from any further backlinking and wait for them to drop off page one.
The alternative method, if you have this resource available to you is a nice big Xrumer blast, again using your main keyword as anchor text and the words "Acai Berry Supplies" and "Cheap Viagra" as surrounding text in the post.
If you do find your competitor popping up again in the SERPS after a few months, simply rinse and repeat this method and (all things going to plan) you will never see their site appear again.
Remember, you must do the complete opposite with your website of course, as your site is now the goodie two shoes in the eyes of the G.
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