Negative SEO scammers use intentional search-policy violations to push down the rank of perceived competitors for a few weeks. While it is more likely the post

Negative SEO scammers use intentional search-policy violations to push down the rank of perceived competitors for a few weeks. While it is more likely the poster will get a few people to check on the situation and naively drive up page rank... a personal site is just a rounding error for traffic in a long-tail distribution known as the modern web. Most search engines will correlate user-side telemetry traffic against crawler and web stats. i.e. if the bots tend to prefer your site for abnormal reasons, the ranking algorithm may blacklist a signature, domain, and IP sets for several weeks as punishment. Note too, it is still common for a human employee to manually check a suddenly popular site that pops up out of obscurity. i.e. this catches the more sophisticated cheats, and may have legal repercussions in severe cases. In summary, if you mess with modern search engines, than expect the ban hammer to fall eventually. ;)