“nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking” goes 404
Google’s Webmaster Help used to say:
What can I do if I’m afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?
There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question.
Located at: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34449&topic=8524
That page now offers up a 404.
I noticed this a couple weeks ago and have been watching it, but it appears to be permanent. It’s possible that they just moved it renamed URLs, so I did some searching for keywords in the old help topic:
None of those searches return anything that resembles the old statement.I haven’t heard anything official on this and am quite nervous about speculating that it’s a de facto way of acknowledging that a competitor can indeed harm you, for example buying tons of spammy paid links and reporting the site. Just because a speed limit sign was there last week and isn’t now doesn’t mean that you can go as fast as you’d like.
I find it kind of odd…
Update: Hat tip to Barry Schwartz for pointing out that the statement is still available here. ( Screenshot )
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