WorldWideWeb WarGames: 8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site
By Peter Poffenberger
Competition on the web is fierce and getting more ruthless by the day. Some webmasters have resorted to using dirty tricks, known as “Google bowling,” to sabotage competing websites. Arm yourself with knowledge and protect your site from these techniques that may be used to undermine your site’s reputation.
- Who’s That Annoying Spammer?Leaving thoughtful comments on blogs that relate to your site is an effective way to build your online reputation and develop relationships with other webmasters. Of course, leaving spammy comments will have the opposite effect, leading webmasters and Google spiders to believe that you’re exploiting them. A competitor can use a spam script that will leave your URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This will diminish the quality of your backlink footprint as well as damage your professional reputation.
- Getting Your Domain Banned in Social Media:Popular social media sites are increasingly advanced at filtering out spam. Netscape doesn’t hesitate to ban URLs that it regards as spammy, and while Digg and Reddit are more reluctant to ban a URL, they generally make it impossible for flagged URLs to see any traffic. Unfortunately, it’s fairly simple for competitors to sabotage your domains simply by creating a username and repeatedly submitting your worst content. They can accelerate the process by registering a few accounts at each site using the same IP and then voting for your content using their multiple accounts. Most social media sites will think that you’re trying to artificially promote your content and automatically flag or ban your domain from their system.
- Spammy Link Buying:There are a number of terrible link farms left over from the nineties that every search engine has flagged as major spam producers. By submitting your site to these link farms, a competitor can destroy the quality of your backlink footprint, and thus lower your trust ranking. This trust ranking determines how high you end up in the search engine results.If your competitor wants to take it one step farther and try to ban your site from Google’s rankings altogether, they can report you for engaging in link buying, even though they bought the links themselves.
- Duplicate Content:Google is smart enough to recognize and filter out duplicate content, only ranking one version. Unfortunately, the search engine can’t always tell which website the content originally came from. As a consequence, a shrewd competitor can keep a regular eye on your site using an RSS, and as soon as you post something new, rip off your content and post an identical version on their own site. If Google indexes your competitor’s version as the original, you’ll miss out on rankings and possibly have your backlink footprint damaged, as Google recognizes duplicate content as an indicator for probable spam sites. If your site is newer or has a low Page Rank, you’re especially vulnerable to this type of sabotage, as Google is more likely to rank established sites instead of yours.
- 301/302 Hijacking:A 301 redirect is a piece of code placed on a page by a webmaster that tells search engines and visitors that the page has moved to a new location. A 301 redirect is a legitimate webmaster technique which is useful, for instance, if you have bought a new domain and would like to move your property over. Unfortunately, a 301 redirect can also be used by competitors to sabotage your ranking. By hacking your site and redirecting your pages to theirs, they can steal both your traffic and your search engine ranking. If you’re dealing with a savvy competitor, they might only redirect some of your older archived pages so that you may not even notice the hijack for quite some time.
While a 301 hijack involves actually hacking your site, a 302 hijack can be accomplished without access to your site. 302 Hijacking is less about permanent Google ranking and more about stealing temporary traffic. A 302 redirect is a piece of code that tells search engines that a page has been temporarily moved, but that it will eventually be moved back to the original location. With a 302 redirect, a competitor’s site will show up in Google and MSN search engine rankings instead of yours. A shrewd competitor can put 302 redirects on their pages that point to yours. When your page shows up in the search engines, some of the time the visitors will be redirected to your competitor’s site, as Google and MSN mistakenly identify their site as the original.
- Denial of service (DOS) attack:A DOS attack is one of the oldest and most illegal online sabotage techniques. Essentially, a competitor overwhelms your server with external communications requests so that it is forced to reset, or it simply cannot serve up pages to legitimate visitors. A well timed DOS attack, particularly one staged during a promotional campaign, can kill your momentum and rob you of quality traffic. DOS attacks take a number of widely varied forms, but because they are so clearly illegal and easy to prosecute, you won’t find many competitors in the western world who regularly engage in this sort of sabotage.
- Kicked Out of AdSense:Google AdSense is, for many webmasters, the primary source of income from their site. Given its importance, it’s rather surprising how easily a malicious competitor can get you banned with a click attack campaign. By simply going to your pages and clicking on ads repeatedly, your competitor will trigger a flag to Google that the advertising clicks you’ve received are illegitimate. Google assumes that you’re trying to artificially increase your own payout, and will often ban users with this sort of action without warning. While Google has a form which allows you to report the attack, many victims report that their inquiries are ignored and their accounts remain banned, despite reporting the incident.
- Click Fraud:On the other end of the advertising sabotage spectrum is click fraud. When you set up AdWords, you calculate your anticipated conversion percentage and price your bid accordingly. However, a competitor can dramatically lower your conversion percentage by clicking on your campaign repeatedly. You’ll pay for the increased clicks, but your conversions stay the same, resulting in a campaign that becomes unprofitable. Often, this is the work of competitors who are bidding on the same keywords. They generally want to eliminate a competitor by raising their costs and lowering or eliminating their campaign profits in order to make participation unsustainable.
Although you may feel helpless against these attacks, victims of sabotage have the law on their side. Many of these 8 methods are explicitly illegal under US law. Those that aren’t still fall under the umbrella of bad faith or deceptive trade practices, both of which will provide you with legal recourse. Of course, it is difficult if not impossible to exact legal revenge upon a saboteur outside the US, and fraud campaigns can hurt whether you win legally or not, so it’s important for webmasters to be proactive about protecting their properties.
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September 11th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
hmm… that’s nice. thanks for the info.
the last thing you said was: “…it’s important… to be proactive about protecting [our] properties,” but you didn’t say how.
can’t wait for your next post detailing the how.
September 11th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
So, why give more people bad ideas? I remember watching the news once talking about the Oklahoma City bombing. They pretty much explained all the ingredients needed to make a bomb and how it was put together. I’m sure a bunch of idiots out there in newbie-webland are going to thank you for giving them new ways to attack their competitors.
September 11th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I’ve been a victim of number 7 (Kicked out of AdSense), or rather I should say “someone” (I know who) attempted to do this to me, but I noticed the odd behaviour on that site and jumped in and reported it with as much detail as I could.
Held nothing back….. I still have my AdSense account, not sure that he does though.
All I can suggest is constantly keep an eye on your stats and if you get that gut feeling that things aren’t right, then look further, and report if you need to.
September 11th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
That’s fantastic - you’ve posted a great set of techniques people can now use to kill their competitors and no solutions. Keep up the good work!
September 11th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Nothing here that caught be by surprise.
I think that taking down a competitor’s website is pretty easy like you’re saying. Doesn’t take much time or skill.
September 11th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Very interesting points. This is pretty scary stuff considering how EASY it is for someone to drop a few hundred dollars and grab an autospammer program of some sort to spread ur links all around the dirty parts of the net.
September 12th, 2007 at 1:33 am
Google luckily became a bit smarter concerning point 7 and 8, they are not open for attack anymore for a while now.
September 12th, 2007 at 9:33 am
thanks for telling my secret strategy!!!!
j/k.
September 12th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I got stomped on by someone who was unhappy with me and my web “accomplishments”. I had my adsense account revoked with no chance of getting it back due to click fraud. Very unfortunate. Only thing I can really say about that is don’t step on anyones toes, because some people don’t play as nice as you might. Even if it’s unintentional as is the case with me, It still hurts just as much.
September 12th, 2007 at 10:36 am
That’s great! The smart people already know how to do all this….now the dumb ones can too.
Good job!
September 12th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Unfortunately, if Google drops you from Adsense, they won’t tell you *why*. That happened to me. I got the notice that I was being dropped for some unspecified violation of terms. I filed a protest asking for more information, and offering to share whatever server logs they needed, but they wouldn’t reinstate my account.
I still no no clue what caused them to drop me.
September 13th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Thank you for this list. I have copied it and printed it for my reference. I have been a victim of #8 already, and I know that when my Google ranking changes dramatically that there is some behind the scenes reason why. Now I have an idea of what to look for. I can usually figure out who, but not the how.
I too await your next post on how to become proactive.
September 14th, 2007 at 4:55 am
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article WorldWideWeb WarGames: 8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
September 14th, 2007 at 8:53 am
5 out of 16 comments on this article are spam.
I guess that author doesn’t really have solutions to the problems described in the article
I personally think that all these problems have to be addressed not by regular web master, but by architects/developers of these rating portals, search engines, and ad networks.
September 15th, 2007 at 9:08 am
[...] v7n, we find 8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site: Although you may feel helpless against these attacks, victims of sabotage have the law on their [...]
September 15th, 2007 at 9:57 am
9.)
use an old fashion comment spammer with your competitors url. spam a thousand blogs and he will never ever get out of akismet filter again in his life.
no more comments with his url, no more trackbacks, banned from the blogosphere.
September 15th, 2007 at 10:35 am
How ironic is it that the Blog Comment Poster script hit this post? Ah well, good info, however it would be nice to see some of the actual examples on how to mitigate these attacks instead of leaving it open and simply saying to stay proactive.
In regards to the Adsense Clicking Issue, several programs such as AsRep and Adsense Gold have built in safeguards against multiple ad clicks from the same IP. While this can obviously be foiled, it does provide a decent way to track some of your annoying, less tech savvy competitors from attacking your sites.
September 15th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Hello, Nice blog posting about WorldWideWeb WarGames: 8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site. I would have to agree with you on this one. I am going to look more into url redirection. This Saturday I have time.
September 15th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title WorldWideWeb WarGames: 8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site. Thanks for informative article
September 16th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Damn that’s some pretty scary stuff there
I can’t believe it’s that easy to damage a site..
September 16th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
thank god for this article dude :o)
-beni
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Very interesting, this really hard to know. Security is very important i think.
Thx for the info.
greetings
Martin
(Polizei )
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:18 am
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January 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 am
That is cool.
January 10th, 2008 at 5:16 am
I was actually looking for how to detect a DDOS attack, anyone know where there is a tool for this?
February 1st, 2008 at 6:53 am
Hi Alexis there is no *tool* to detect DoS attack.
You need special filter for your apache. Try to find out who the DoS works and search for apache filters.
regards
Monika
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Useful site. Thanks:-)
March 6th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I’m honestly confused about whether to think that this article is beneficial or not. Sure, it warns us of what can be done to our sites, but it helps more those who wish to use those techniques than those who want to protect themselves from them.
I can’t wait for another follow-up article to address the latter group.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Did you not noticed that bad people read this page as “8 Ways to Sabotage your Competitor’s Site”?
March 12th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I meant “have you not…”.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Useful site. Thank you!
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April 5th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
It’s very unfortunate that someone can sabotage your site so easily. Maybe technology will catch up soon enough to prevent things like this from happening. Sigh.
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July 27th, 2008 at 9:25 am
To point #4, Duplicate Content, I’m increasingly finding that copyrighted content from my website is appearing on other sites, without attribution, as if it was their own. Amazing!
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