Toronto SEO Firm - GTA SEO & SEM Specialist

There have been rumors of such techniques floating around for ages and there are even some black-hat SEO’s that specialize in this type of “link bombing”.  The gist of the deal is that you create organically or through purchase ‘bad’ links to your competitor’s websites in hopes of causing their search engine rank position to plummet.

There are a couple of interesting posts floating around about this practice because someone from Google has chimed in on this controversial topic.  It is funny how a subject matter can take on a complete different view depending on how you look at it.  There are a couple of headlines out there that in my opinion are quite deceiving: “Google Defends Bad Link Theory & Repeats That Competitors Can’t Hurt You” and “Google Debunks Link Sabotage Theories” - In both cases I think the reality is the complete opposite of the titles.  Here are the two quotes that made me realize this, “Most of these guidelines involve the content on the site itself, something which generally can’t be changed through links pointing to the site.”  To me this means that some of the guidelines refer to incoming links and those can and will affect  your site in a negative way.  The next quote is even more ominous, “In theory, I can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing website issues I have not once run into a situation like that. Also, I know that if a situation like that were to come to our attention, it would be resolved very quickly.”  This last one tells me that it is possible and because of stiff competition I believe it is even likely.  Sure, if it comes to their attention that it is being done it can be resolved but it might never come to their attention, right?

Bottom line is that it is very unfair that something beyond your control should affect your website’s ranking.  Especially when it is so easy for a competitor to use these techniques to harm your site.  I am also guessing that the occurrence of this type of black-hat technique is much more prevalent than anyone knows.  After all, a few positions in Google ranking for popular keywords can means 10’s of thousands of dollars to some businesses.

Yahoo has been busy as a beaver (as we Canadians would say) with a slew of new announcements yesterday.

The most interesting one is the launch of Yahoo! Circular, an online retail marketing program modeled after newspaper circulars/inserts.  This activity blitz comes just as Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting was set for August 1 where Corporate raider Carl Icahn and a slate of new board members are expected to attempt their coup at the meeting, targeting CEO Jerry Yang’s job and trying to force a Microsoft acquisition agreement.

As part of this aggressive plan, Yahoo has brought Walmart.com on board in a multi-year deal allowing Yahoo to provide display and video advertising for the retail giant. Wal-Mart also announced this week its foray into the classified advertising space. According to the Yahoo deal, Wal-Mart will use Yahoo’s AMP! Advertising management platform to reach Yahoo audiences, and Yahoo will be the exclusive reseller of Wal-Mart’s display inventory.

I wonder if all this excitement and activity will die down once the Yahoo! changes ownership?

Here is another screen capture (click to enlarge) of some of the local competition, while I won’t comment on their pricing I can say that their website is very 90’s - and super light on information but they do rank well for some competitive terms so maybe they are worth every cent?

One thing I know for sure is that with all the changes expected in search engine ranking, SEO and SEM will be even more important.  The goood ole’ days of tricking the search engines with black and grey hat spam will soon be gone.  Both Google and Yahoo have both applied for patents which will look much more closely at the quality and structure of websites in determining their rank value.