Okay, so this is a long-running series and I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface. Nothing but words words words and I still feel like I can give you probably a dozen more long posts covering various areas of SEO warfare. But that’s okay; some of you have told me that you love it when I talk sweet to you so here’s some more of that sexy SEO you love to hear. But in this case, we’re gonna be talking about some of that nasty Anti-SEO or Negative SEO. But it goes along with what I call SEO Warfare, which is probably the most accurate way to describe some of the evil methods you’re about to read.

We’ve explored exploring your competition. We’ve talked about outranking competitors. We’ve layed out some of the more accessible backlink-getting methods. And we’ve bs’d a lot as well. This post is how to outright sabotage your competition.

WARNING

Some of the techniques presented here are downright evil. (Which is the whole point.) Some of them could be illegal. All of them should be done through proxies if you do them, and of course I’m not suggesting you do any of them. I’m not kidding. But remember - this is SEO Sabotage.

Report Him for His Spam

You can send spam emails out “from” your competitor. Or even better, you could just find out who his hosting provider is, and complain to them about all the spam you get from his domain. OR even better, you can report him to:

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

http://help.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/spamreport/spamreport.asp (If GoDaddy is their registrar)

http://www.spamcop.net/

…etc. There are more. The goal is to get him blacklisted.

But here’s an additional idea: piss off the blog aggregators and ping services by spamming them and blaming your competitor. Hammer them with pings for his feed, let’s say every 5 or ten minutes. All day. (Using a script of course.)

Create Unwanted Links to Him

You can do the following a few ways, but the principle is the same. Create a site, fill it with whatever you want that would negatively affect him, and link back to him with it. Do this enough times, and you’ve got something effective. What to put on those sites? How about the company logo and text like the following…

“We here at Ace Widgets have been in business for 20 years here in Pleasantville. We are the oldest Pleasantville widget shop. After are safety recall last year and the ensuing legal battles, we are now back in business and have resolved the many consumer complaints. Click here to visit our website and buy a widget at acewidgets.com.”

You use “Ace Widgets”, “Pleasantville widget”, “safety recall”, “lawsuit”, “consumer complaints”, “buy widget” and “acewidgets.com” as your anchor text to link back to them. If you do this with a hundred free blogs and free hosting services, and get all of them indexed in the search engines…well, what do you think is gonna show up in search results for your competitor? If YOU were searching to buy a widget in your town, and you see a link to a shop but it’s got links next to it referencing complaints and lawsuits…would you even consider buying from them?

You can also create spammy links to him or you can create a site that you get banned from Google and link it to him.

Onsite Techniques

The previous methods are all offsite - which is usually all we think about. But yes there are indeed onsite techniques you can use - or at least techniques which are based on something you do to the site itself.

Does he run a blog? A lot of companies do run blogs these days. They’re valuable for keeping the customer informed about their product and blah blah blah. Go there, and see if it allows comments. It does? Good. So look for a post that isn’t so new, like from at least two months ago. Post a comment, and in that comment put a paragraph all about generic stuff regarding his product or whatever. And for your name just put whatever, but the anchor text could be one of the following: 1) A banned domain, 2) A spammy domain, 3) Porn, etc.

Hmmm…but what if he clicks it and sees that? He would just delete the comment. Oh, I know! Use one of your fake sites, and make it look real! Make it a “Widget Fan Club” site so if he does click on it, it looks fine and he doesn’t delete the comment. Give your comment two weeks, and then go to your fake site and either change the content (and get it indexed for whatever awful content you place on there - “We at Ace Widgets Proudly Support the KKK!”) or do a redirect to suicidegirlscams.com or gaywidgets.com or something. Hahaha! Best would be to combine the technique above and make him link to the fake “complaint” page.

Or, fill up the comments page with irrelevant comments. This doesn’t work if the “webmaster” actually moderates the comments. But you can effectively hijack the page if you post more content in the comments than the article itself contains. So let’s say a blog entry concerns the subject of “Dogs”. However, you want the page to rank for “Cats” - your site is about cats. So you post a dozen comments under different names, each with the anchor text pointing to a cats site. Each comment is full of three paragraphs about cats. Guess what Google sees when they visit the page? Not a page about dogs. Not anymore. Now…it’s a page about cats. Full of your links.

Okay, so say you don’t wanna play that dirty, but you still want to play somewhat dirty. You don’t want to slander him, but you’d like to make him and all your competitors link back to you. Can it be done? Oh yeah, it can.

First set up a directory using PHP Link Directory - widgetlinks.com. Then put links to all your competitor’s sites as well as your real site. Make your competitors links “NoFollow” (for what it’s worth).

Now, get the program i-Faker and get ready for the fun. You’re gonna send all your competitor’s websites some traffic - from your directory website. i-Faker will send them hits and say it’s from widgetlinks.com. Do this for a week or so, and then email the admins for all the websites saying, “Hi, I run widgetlinks.com and I noticed that your site is getting a lot of traffic from me - do you mind purchasing a premium listing for your link, or at least doing a reciprocal link with us? Your site doesn’t even link to me and I’m not sure how you got approved for a link.” He’s either gonna purchase the link from you on your directory (charge like $14.99 or something for it) OR he’s gonna just throw up a reciprocal. Almost no one is gonna refuse. If they do, or if they ignore you for a week, send another email and say “Since you aren’t sending me reciprocal traffic I’m taking your link down. That should relieve our server of sending 2000 visitors a week to you. If you want the link to stay on our site, please purchase a link or give us a reciprocal link. Thanks.” Yeah it’s not true but who cares.

So hopefully they link to you. If they don’t, take the $15 and get drunk. But hopefully they link to you because you’re gonna turn that link into something better. If you wait a while, let’s say a month, the site(s) linking to you should forget all about you and you can do a redirect from your directory site to your site.

More Possibilities

You don’t have a viable idea yet? Okay, think with me about the other possibilities. What could you accomplish if you had an automatic solution that never needed to rest, never stopped working, and could work ten times as fast as a human? The possibilities are endless when we’re dealing with webbots. How about a webbot that could…

• Endlessly visit a website, and reload a large image each time to use all the bandwidth
• Scrape a website’s contents, reformat the contents with links to a different site, create a free blog account, and post this content to a free blog - just for the fun of it of course
• Send a “trackback” to posts on a blog, making it look like a trackback from a related blog. However, it links to the site of your choice.
• Download all of a site’s contents…over, and over, and over…
• Load 1000 new sessions and fill 1000 shopping carts with products each night (a nightmare for an ecommerce site!)

A lot of people would pay some good cash for a webbot that did the following:

1. Scrape all the target (competitor’s) site’s backlinks and put them into a database
2. Go to each of the backlinks, and scrape the contact info for that website, and add that to the db
3. Email each of those websites with something like this: “Hi, thanks for linking to my site __[your competitor's site]____ on your page located at ________. I appreciate the link, but I’m getting ready to consolidate my site with another one of my sites at the following domain: ____[insert your site here]___. Can you please update your link to reflect this? I really appreciate it - by the way I’ve placed a link to your site on my links page on my new site. Thanks!”

You would then create a “broken” links page - it could have a few links and a note saying: “Our links section will be back online on __[Future date, always five days away]__”.

Yeah, pretty hardcore. You can only imagine what would happen. Sure, a lot of people will ignore the email. Some will see something wrong and not change it. A number will not want to bother changing the link. But there’s a percentage that will dutifully change the link just because you asked real nice.

Today, I looked at the number of backlinks one of our competing sites has. (For an ecommerce site.) It numbered something like 5,017. A few hundred come from the same sites, so let’s say I have 4,500 unique websites to email asking for this link to be changed. If even 10% do it, I’ve stolen 450 backlinks!

That is SEO warfare. Ahhh….I love the smell of webbots in the morning.

Stumble it!