Despite Google’s advice that there is practically nothing that a competitor can do to hurt your rankings there is another deadly loophole which can be used with brutal effect against a competitor. In the last 18 months a competitor of Elixir Interactive has been targeting us in a smear campaign. We documented the entire story here www.elixirinteractivecomplaints.com. This company has created dozens of pieces of content most of it duplicated and distributed it on the web. Because of our own online reputation they had not penetrated the top results with the false information until they exploited Google and Bing’s weakness when it comes to spam linking. The false information about us appears on the site pissed consumer.com and by using a deliberate very inexpensive linking campaign they were able to rank the article about us at the top of Google. Here is how they did it.
The false information on pissed consumer.com has many links from spun content posted various blogs. Below is an example of this spun content. Notice how the articles simply replace a few of the words with synonyms like ‘promoting’ with ‘advertising and marketing’ and ‘higher education’ with ‘college’. The anchor text “elixir interactive” is pointing to the pissed consumer article. They have used just two articles in this way to create multiple links.
Source code showing the article linking to pissedconsumer.com
Source code showing the article linking to pissedconsumer.com
There were also many spam comments posted on blogs pointing to the false information on pissed consumer.com with targeted anchor text.
By using spam comments by the boatload on other blogs and spinning articles and posting them on their blog network they could create enough of these links to rank the page. Google recently created a lot of controversy by penalizing JC Penney for bad linking. When I see how effective this spam linking still is I feel that Google must have removed JC Penney manually. They are not even close to catching this type of link spam and it is a major factor in influencing Google and Bing’s rankings. If this type of spam is allowed and with great efficiency then why go after paid links? Why are paid links demonized by Google and this type of link spam rages on? Google has known about this for a very long time and there are people out there selling content spinning software, comments by the boatload and Link Wheels. Why? Because it works you can see just how well from this example.
By exploiting this deadly loophole to gain top rankings these attackers have been able to place very damaging and false accusations about us at the top of Google and Bing. When the search engines tell you there is almost nothing that a competitor can do to hurt your rankings that may be true but there other ways they can hurt you which are just as damaging. If the person doing this had to find quality editorial earned linking to gain these rankings to the article it would never have seen the light of day. I do not expect Google and Bing to police the lunatics on the web but I do expect them to know the difference between a good and a bad link. There should be an appeal process to remove something this blatant and clearly deliberate. A blog post talking about how reputable we are pointing to a link on pissed consumer containing false and derogatory content is a very obvious attempt to influence Google rankings with malicious intent. If Google and Bing knew the difference between a link placed with intent to influence their results and an editorially gained link it would not happen. Google has wall to wall PHD’s why can’t they work this out?
I am not naïve enough as to think this is simple I realize it’s not and Google in particular already do a good job with its results but its loopholes like this that need to be addressed to make Google even better than it is today.
