[atourgates]

I was sitting in a meeting just the other week where this came up. We were giving our spiel about how there aren't really any shortcuts that work long-term with SEO, and if you pay someone $20 to create 1,000s of spammy backlinks, Google will notice and you'll be severely penalized for it.

So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying $20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-links to our competitor's site?"

I'm shocked that this hasn't become a more common or publicized tactic. I can't imagine how you'd trace it, and the way things are right now, all the burden of proof and cleanup is on the site owner.

They could certainly disavow the links, but it seems like you could pretty easily and cheaply become a pain in the ass of just about any small to medium site on the internet.

[robomartin]

In the real world business can be war. I have personally experienced a major competitor bribing my top resellers to not feature my product at major tradeshows (a friend on the inside showed me the emails). I've also had a major multinational attempt to keep me off my own booth at a trade show by filing a false temporary restraining order against me (thrown out by a judge who got amazingly angry at the attorney and corporate rep for misusing the law). They did this because I was absolutely kicking their ass with better technology and I was very vocal about it (I was stupid).

Anyhow, my point is that if you don't do it there's always a chance they will do it to you. That's the main reason to still play the patent game: protection from bad actors.

Spending $20 per month to destroy your competitor's inbound lead generation channel would be brilliant and very effective. Is it ethical? I'll let philosophy majors deal with that. Until you've been the subject of truly underhanded business tactics by an adversary far more financially poweful than you could ever be you don't really understand the dark side of the business world.

The only reason I would not tend to do something like this is that it could have pretty serious legal implications. IANAL yet I can imagine a potential twist that could turn something like that into a defamation lawsuit or worst. A small company would be really foolish to even attempt this. A large corporation, on the other hand, has the resources to make this sort if thing happen and avoid being connected to it.

[GoodIntentions]

I saw this technique proposed on a webmaster's forum many years ago. If google hasn't given some thought to detecting this type of manipulation, I'd be surprised. If they've actually figured out how to reliably detect and discount it, I'd be doubly surprised.