On one of my latest posts about getting a free backlink with your favicon, an interesting conversation topic was brought up: anti-SEO. We all know that Google can penalize you for having your site show up on link farms and other shady sites, but just how much? Would it be enough to knock your SERP’s down a notch?

If so, then companies dedicated to destroying the ranks of competitor websites are bound to soon appear (if they don’t exist already). These shady tactics probably go further than blackhat (but what should they be called; is there a color blacker than black? Note to self: must investigate) – surely this kind of stuff is illegal. I’m far too lazy I currently don’t have the resources to properly investigate this claim, but I suppose it’d fall under the legal categories of “defamation” and “being a total asshat(there’s the term I was looking for!)”

DESTROY YOUR COMPETITION – LITERALLY!
Think about it: instead of spending all your time building backlinks and carefully creating quality content, you could just submit your competitors websites to link farms, porn sites, and other such distasteful web venues. Google will (theoretically) devalue aforementioned websites and as they move down in rank, you will indirectly move up! Sounds like a solid plan, eh? While your competitors wonder why they are getting hits from Viagra websites, you’ll be raking in the search engine traffic like there’s no tommorow!

BUT THERE WILL BE NO TOMMOROW FOR ANTI-SEO
Destroying your competitors rankings might sound like a solid plan, but unless you’re competing against legally blind monkeys (which some of us are, I’m sure) they’re bound to notice and file some sort of complaint. This stuff would have to happen manually, though, creating a painful process for both site owners and search engine employees, because I doubt even Google algorithms are smart enough to sort links depending on intent. Take that, robots!

OR WILL THERE?
If you dig deep enough into the online underworld, you’re bound to find some people offering this kind of service. It’s probably not very effective and is as safe as getting a heart transplant from a shady back-alley surgeon, but at least it’s something. Will this type of anti-SEO ever have a large effect on search engines? In short, no – gaming search engines isn’t that easy, but it’s pretty interesting to think about.

QUICK UPDATE: The stuff I was referring to in this post is called Googlebowling.