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This comes up as a hypothetical risk whenever stories like this break, but I know of no cases where it happens. That includes situations where individual link-b

This comes up as a hypothetical risk whenever stories like this break, but I know of no cases where it happens. That includes situations where individual link-buyers and link-buying sites have been publicly outed by commentators or competitors. The economics of this only work out well if you have high marketshare (if you're 5% of the market, and you blow up a competitor, 95% of the benefit accrues to the other 95% of the market). So I think this threat is overblown. Every time it comes up, I've asked for examples--if you hear of any after the fact, I would greatly appreciate it if you'd get in touch. Email's in the profile.

uriah 15y ago
Isn't the relevant "market" searches for whatever keyword group you are considering? The marketshare of clicks is mainly divided among the 10 sites on the front page. I imagine the benefit, when shared among only 1-9 sites, could be significant. Also consider the benefit of moving from ranking 11 to 10 or from 2 to 1, for example. Though I can't speak for the efficacy of this technique, this fairly old article suggests submitting competitors articles to directories to reduce their perceived (by search engines) quality: http://www.bluehatseo.com/open-questions-when-to-never-do-article-submissions http://www.bluehatseo.com/open-questions-when-to-never-do-ar...