Can Competitors Affect Your Ranking?

All of us have this unspoken fear inside us, how our competitors can harm our business. When it comes to on online business, the fear is how our competitors can harm our ranking. If this has been your fear, then you can be rest assured that your competitors cannot do anything to affect your ranking directly. However, what they can do is to improve their own ranking by making better efforts than yours.

Nonetheless, it is better to be cautious on few areas. First of all you must make sure that your website is fully secured and no application files are left unsecured. You must not allow your website to be hacked at any point of time. If it is hacked, then the hackers can install malicious scripts in your computer, which can affect the users computers when visitors visit your website. This can lead to the display of the notice, ‘This site may harm your computer.’ in Google listing. When this is displayed no user will dare to ignore such a warning. If your competitor is an unscrupulous person and if you are careless then you can be faced with such situations. This will of course affect the traffic to your website.

Another area that you need to pay attention is your links. For instance, your site may be linked by third parties without prior permission from you. Websites that receives links from link farms can be penalized by the search engines. Search engines will have control only on the ranking of websites and they can in no way have control over the content of the web pages and it does not have a system to verify whether the links to a website are approved by website owner. So you must constantly check your site to see who is linking to your website. If you see dubious sites linking to you then you must contact them to have your link removed so that you do not face unnecessary trouble. Do not be happy because you are getting free links without reviewing the sites that link to you. If you have competitors to go to his extent then you will be getting free links from link farms. So these are the ways your competitors can affect your ranking.

There is always this positive competition and your competitors may be taking highly effective steps that will take them up in the rankings. This can push you down in the search results page. Positive competition should always be treated with positive outlook and effective strategies should be implemented to fight the competition without engaging in any spammy approaches or black hat tricks. This way your website will become more credible. If you start using black hat tricks in your desperation to over come the competition, then you are very likely to lose your current rankings sooner or later and lose your online credibility too.

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