It's their fault

Johannes Beus
This is a reaction that I have repeatedly heard when there is an unexpected decline in searchengine-positions, though never when the position goes up. Many website-operators accuse the competition for a share in the responsibility for the decline. They cite long lists of meta-keyword-data, Google spam-notice-forms and imply that the competition is using every hurtful behavior to degrade their site that they can think of. What should we make of this?

It is no secret that Google's inclusion of the inconspicuous word “practically” into the “Competitors have practically no way to degrade your ranking or delete your website from the index” text in their helptext for webmasters is an indirect recognition that there are ways to harm a competitors Googleindex standing. Though it has to be said that they are not talking about simple and generally known methods and approaches to accomplish this. One or two too many keywords or ugly links from “evil” websites are, nowadays, no reasons for Google to degrade the page in question. For this to work there needs to be a more sophisticated and elaborate approach and a combination of methods. I would guess that the number of people with the necessary knowledge and skill, in Germany, is in the low two-digits.

Through closer examination of cases where those in charge did not want to assume responsibility for a fall in the ratings we find that mistakes are made: no standard domain which leads to duplicate content and backlink-building which are based exclusively on web catalogs and article directories are customary. So before looking at the competition for those responsible one should first make absolutely sure that they themselves did not make an error – this being the cause for most of the SEO-mistakes.
Johannes Beus - on Sun (06/29/2008) at 00:20 AM

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