Competitor purchased thousands of hidden links to our website... will it hurt rankings?

[Nick_Seo_Moz]

A competitor has allegedly purchased a site wide HIDDEN link on a property that links to our website. Would this link hurt our rankings?

Requests to the site to remove those links didn't go well -- they state they can legally link to any site they like and are not going to remove those links.

Technically speaking, this is what the link looks like in their html:

Our Primary Keyword

The thousands of hidden links from this website will now vastly outnumber our existing backlinks.

[CaseyKluver]

There was a whiteboard a few months ago (sorry I couldn't find the link) where Rand was talking about this. I believe they figured out that you will not be rewarded or hurt, but Google will simple ignore these links because of the fact that anyone could get anyone banned through tactics like this.

BUT, the fact that this is in a hidden div may alter this theory, so I'll let someone answer that for sure.

[EGOL]

You made a low-effort attempt to get them removed.

Don't go to war over this.

If your site gets whacked... then go to war.

[RobMay]

Hey Nichank,

This is a tough one to answer, as to whether Google would look negatively on this. My bet is yes. Because the lnik is using

, and hiding content links using anchor text, my bet with recent algorithm changes, panda and freshness is that it will look upon these.

The only good thing that may save you here is they pointed 'thousands' of these links - which in itself makes the site linking to you (or sites) look like link farms - which Google would also detect and determine to be valueless' to the user - thus - nullifying thier efforts.

This might also revolve around the 'niche' industry your in, which could also play a part in Google's determination and action on such links.

This would make a really great test from an SEO perspective. I think I'll add this one to my books for 2012! If I find any results - I'll make sure to come back with some concrete answers

A good link I found to support Google penalizing the site linking to you more (because they are using hidden text and links) within their pages.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

[RobMay]

I like this answer! LOL 'go to war'.. when and if it happens you site is affected. I would also 'log' the date you caught these, so you can go back historically if traffic drops happen and associate this with the inbound link buy someone obviously did.

[Nick_Seo_Moz]

Google contradicts itself on their guidelines. And if you read between the lines, then  it seems that YES, a competitor can screw with you!.....

Can competitors harm ranking?

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. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

Taken from:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34449&topic=2365140&ctx=topic