Your Competitors CAN Hurt You … Here’s How.

It’s often said that there’s nothing that your competitors can do to your site that would get it penalized or in trouble with the search engines. While this may be true for a mature site, it doesn’t hold for new sites.

First Impressions Are Crucial

New sites have little history in the search engines and your early link profile says a lot about what type of site you have and what neighborhood your site belongs to. As in real life, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so those first few links go a very long way towards letting the engines know how your site fits into the overall web graph. This is why links from large authoritative general directories (Yahoo, Best of the Web, DMOZ) and quality niche, topical directories are quality links for new sites as they allow the engines to classify your site.

Now imagine a site which is brand spankin new that also has no history with the engines. They know nothing about it besides what they can infer from on-page data (which isn’t enough to rank your site in the majority of markets), but beyond that don’t really know what the site is about. This webmaster, instead of paying to get reviewed and admitted into the quality general directories listed above, decided to go the quick and dirty route of getting 1000 directory submissions for $0.99, or whatever the hot, spammy directory deal of the day may be. In the eyes of the search engines, this new site now has 1000 links all coming from places that have a very high probability of being spam. This is not good. It will make it harder to rank for your core terms and you will need even more quality links to offset the Spamage (spam + damage = Spamage) that has already been done.

Spammy Links and Spammy People

Why does this happen? It’s really no different than the real world. Think about a situation where you just met somebody for the first time. First impressions are huge. Because you have had no interaction with this person before, your first impression of the person will be entirely based on that one interaction. If that interaction sucks (search engine spider lingo: is spammy), you are not going to like that person, whether or not it is an accurate representation of who the person really is (ie the quality of their content).

This could be how search engines also view your site. If your first links are from sites that have been marked by the engines as likely to be low quality spam, the search engines are not going to want to rank you, regardless of the quality of your on page content. Ideally if the content is good, you will attract links from the right places over time and you will rank, but that’s a different story for a different post.

Another Benefit of Aged Sites

The reason this doesn’t pertain to an aged mature site is that the engines have plenty of signals regarding what the site is about and where it lies in the grand scheme of things. Aged sites have had a longer period to acquire links and for those links to age. Adding 1000 low quality directory links to a 6 year old site with 30,000 backlinks and 800 .edus is a lot less risky than adding them to a brand new sites with no link profile.

Using the above information, I’m sure you can figure out how a competitor can get a newb site started on the wrong foot and make it hard for it to rank. I do believe that karma will come back to bite you in the ass if you did go out of your way to do this to a competitor, but it’s something to be aware of so that people understand just how important those foundational links can be to the overall well being of your site.