Every day there is more and more competition on the web and there is no need not to mention that the competition is getting fierce. Webmasters have been known to use some underhanded tricks, one such trick is known as Google Bowling. By reading up on some of the methods that other webmasters may choose to ruin your sites reputation.

Spammers:  One way that honest webmasters use to get more traffic to their site is by leaving nice comments on blogs that are in some way related to your site. What other under handed webmasters may do is leave a comment that sounds more like spam than just a friendly helpful comment. This in turn will have a negative effect on your site. What happens is that search engines and spiders that crawl your site will actually believe that you are trying to exploit them. A competing webmaster in the same field as you will use a script made for spamming. This will actually leave your sites URL in many, many blogs in the comments and in the forum sections. In turn it may actually damage your reputation for being an honest webmaster.

Another trick that is used is for other webmasters to get your domain banned in the social media circles of the web. Other popular media sites are becoming more and more advanced in the art of taking out the spam before it reaches your site. Companies like Netscape have been known to ban sites because they come across as spam. Other sites such as Digg and Reddit are more lenient when it comes to banning sites. But they will make it harder and harder for that URL to get a search results. In the world of the web, it is very easy to make another person’s site come across as spam.

They can also step up the process by signing up a couple of accounts at each of these sites using the exact same IP address and then putting up your content using the numerous accounts, so it comes across as duplicate content which search engines penalize for. Social media sites will start to think that you are trying to artificially promote your site and the result may be banning or a red flag will be issued.

The next underhanded method is called Spammy Link Buying. There are many link farms available on the web, but there are a few that are downright awful. These may be the link farms that were started in the 90’s and have been flagged by all of the current search engines because they are considered a major spam producer. By devious webmasters submitting a link with your URL to these places, it can really take a huge toll on your back link footprint. Then in turn your rank of an honest website will slip further away. If that does not suffice for your arch competitor then they may go as far as trying to ban you from Google altogether. They can try to rat on you that you are engaging in link buying, which Google now frowns upon.

Another very popular way to get penalized from the search engines is having Duplicate Content.  Google is very advanced and they are very intelligent to know about duplicate content and they can even filter it out when they come across it. But it may be hard to tell which website had the content first so both sites may be penalized for it. A competitor that want to hurt you can view your site by using an RSS feed and when you put up something new, they will steal it and put it on their site. The competitor is taking a huge chance by assuming that the search engines will index their content over yours. If they do then they may site your site for spam.

There is something is called a 301/302 Hijacking. What this means is a 301 redirect which a code that webmasters use in order to direct the user to another site location. While the 301 redirect is a legal action that webmasters can use but evil webmasters can take advantage of your redirect to direct traffic to their site. It is like stealing traffic, which is why they call it hijacking. All a competitor has to do is hack into your site and redirect your site to theirs. A 301 hijacking really includes someone physically hacking into your site a 302 hijacking can be set up without every having to touch your site. When a 302 hijack has been executed, it is the competitor’s site that will show up in Google and MSN search engines.

You may also become the victim of what is called Denial of Service attack or Dos for short. This underhanded move is the oldest and one of the most illegal actions that you can perform on the web.  When this happens, a competitor will take over your server with many external communications so that the server will have to reset itself or it becomes unable to give your users any pages. Though this is highly frowned upon, it is not used much anymore.
 
Some competitors may try to take you out of the game by getting you kicked out of Adsense. Google adsense for   a lot of webmasters is a main source or income and what better way to knock out the competition than to take away their livelihood. The way webmasters go about this is that they do a click attack. They go to your ads on your site and just click and click and click. The more money you accumulate the more Google will think that you are having someone click on your ads in order to increase your income. You can protect yourself by reporting the click attack to Google and they can do an investigation.

The last way to attack a competitor is by what is known as click fraud.  When you sign up and activate an Adwords account, you can place a bid in whichever manner you choose to. Your competitor can lower the conversion percentage by clicking on the campaign over and over again. Almost in the same fashion as we just discussed.

There are ways to prevent an attack and did you know that all of the methods that we provided are actually illegal under the United States law. Be diligent and keep an eye on every aspect of your site and look out for evil webmasters trying to bring you down.