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.

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2. 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.

   
   
3. 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.

   
   
4. 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.

   
   
   
5. 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.