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How your competitors can sabotage your website
rankings
High rankings on search engines can help you to get a lot
of customers. If your website has high rankings on Google
for a good keyword then your website will get a lot of attention.
Your competitors also know that and and some of them might
not use ethical business practices. There are some things
that your competitors might do to sabotage your search engine
rankings:
1. Your competitors might create spam under your
name
All major search engines use links to calculate the ranking
of web pages. It's not only the number of links that counts
but also the quality.
Your competitor might add your website to several spam
linking schemes to hurt your site.
In addition, your competitor might use your website URL
for spamming in online forums, social network sites and
blog comments. Although it's not you who is spamming the
websites, it will be hard to prove that you're innocent
and social network sites might ban your website (which
will have a negative effect on the link structure of your
site).
2. Your competitors might peach on you
Did you buy links on other websites to improve your search
engine rankings? Google doesn't like that at all. If your
competitor finds out that you use paid links he might tell
Google and your rankings might drop.
The same can happen if you use any unethical SEO method
on your website (hidden text, cloaking, etc.). If your
competitor finds out and informs Google then it's likely
that it will affect your search engine rankings.
3. Your competitor might send a copyright complaint
If a search engine has been notified about a copyright
infringement on your website then the search engine must remove
the page from its index for 10 days. If your competitor
files a copyright complaint against you then your website
can be temporarily removed from the search results.
4. Your competitor might create duplicate content
Search engines don't like duplicate content. If more than
one web page has the same content then search engines will
pick one page and drop the rest.
If your competitor creates duplicates of your web page
content then these duplicates might get better rankings
than your own site. Of course, this can cause legal problems
for the person who duplicates the content (as all methods
mentioned in this article).
You cannot avoid that unethical competitors spam other sites
with your name but you can avoid being banned for using spam
techniques on your web pages. Only
use ethical search engine optimization methods to get
high rankings on Google and other major search engines.
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