The basic problem is Google has no idea what good content is. It relies on external 'signals' to determine what to rank. Those signals will be manipulated by pe

The basic problem is Google has no idea what good content is. It relies on external 'signals' to determine what to rank. Those signals will be manipulated by people. Once a manipulation strategy becomes widespread enough to impact search quality Google will adjust to compensate. This game has been going on for many years. It's cat and mouse between SEO black hats and Google engineers. I have looked into black hat SEO (a few years ago). Two words of caution: 1) Setting up black hat (or grey hat) can be costly and time consuming. 2) You are assuming the competitor's rank is going up due to black hat SEO. That may not be the case. A few backlinks from top sites can leave you in the dust.