Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Dear Idris,

Technically, your competitors could outrank you, moving your spot farther down the Google listings.

The way to fight back is through content creation and posting: media rich content. As in the advice from The Art of War, "When you are weak, you must appear strong. When you are few in number, you must appear to be many."

Search engine spiders like to see PDFs, videos, audios, blog posts, and links from your site to other sites within your niche. This all goes to reinforce the connectivity of your site and it helps your search rankings.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
Princeton, NJ, USA

Well, there are ways to do this. They could spend a lot of money and buy spammy, horrible links and potentially get you penalized.

They could create negative reviews and other reputation-damaging tactics though those could help your rankings. There are a lot of creative and skilled black hats out there that could employ or devise a number of potentially damaging tactics.

However, most of the tactics that would cause you harm would require a great deal of cost or time or both and may not actually work. Unless you are in a seriously cut throat vertical, it doubt that it would be worthwhile effort.

You asked the question for a reason, is there a specific concern?

Generally speaking, most companies are too focused on what their competitors can do, or might do, and that takes their focus off of doing what they need to do to get the best results for themselves.

It's certainly possible that a competitor will outspend you, outsmart you, or pull a fast one on you, but if you spend your own energy and resources playing spy-versus-spy, you'll miss the opportunity to communicate your unique positioning benefit to your customer base.

My suggestion: Do your thing as well as you know how to do it, and let your competitors divert their attention to the less-important quest for trying to beat you out based on some clever technical trick that will almost certainly be short-lived.