Aikido with Competitors: Click Fraud and Other Prohibited Techniques

High competition and large checks force the faint-hearted to resort to unfair competition. In the fields of internet marketing, there are sometimes complex battles where successful sites suffer from attacks by "colleagues in the industry."

You need to know 6 techniques that competitors use to complicate each other's lives. Also, how to identify them and what countermeasures to use to avoid significant damage. 

The approach can vary. It can be aimed not only at reputational losses but also at destroying your site or advertising on the internet. 

It is important to emphasize that in 8 out of 10 cases when my clients complained about "ubiquitous competitors" — it turned out to be unresolved issues of the project itself or excessive anxiety. But sometimes the concerns were indeed justified.

Click Fraud in Yandex Direct

Click fraud is a method to drain a competitor's budget through advertising. A bot farm or a large group of diligent employees intentionally click on Yandex Direct or Google Ads ads. As a result, your budget is wasted.

Signs of click fraud:

• A sharp increase in CTR without an increase in the number of applications
• A large number of bounces with visits lasting 0-2 seconds
• Suspicious geography and timing: clicks occur at night when you are not advertising, and the user is from a non-target region
• Matching IP addresses

Yandex and Google are aware of this problem, but it is still impossible to completely solve it. About 25% of fraudulent clicks pass through filters. Therefore, you need to take the initiative into your own hands.

What to do to combat click fraud:

• Complain to technical support. Sometimes this helps, but you need to have undeniable evidence (screenshots of suspicious activity, bot IP addresses, etc.)
• If bot traffic comes from the Yandex advertising network (YAN), block non-target sites with 100% bounces.
• Use anti-fraud services. They analyze each click and automatically block bots.

Negative Manipulation of Behavioral Factors

For search engines, it is critically important how visitors behave on a site. The combination of user actions is called behavioral factors.

A client visited the site, scrolled through pages, clicked buttons, read an article — good.

A client visited the site, didn't find what they were looking for, and immediately returned to search — bad.

In the second case, the search engine reads that the site poorly satisfies user requests, and therefore lowers it in the rankings. With the help of bots imitating poor behavioral factors, a site's reputation can be significantly damaged.

How to recognize negative manipulation of behavioral factors:

• Increase in the robotness indicator in metrics
• A significantly increased number of short visits without clicks

How to combat negative manipulation of behavioral factors:

• An effective method: Cloudflare and other anti-fraud services cut off automated visits to the site.

Toxic Links

A previously common method to sink competitors in the rankings. A backlink is a link from an external site to your own. The quantity and quality of donor sites are critically important for SEO. Getting a link from an authoritative site is not only beneficial but also expensive. Links from junk sites, which do more harm than good, cost mere pennies. This is what malicious actors exploit.

With the help of a special malicious script, hundreds of toxic links from 18+ sites, online casinos, and the like quickly burden the victim site. The search engine receives an alarming signal and lowers the site in the rankings as "contaminated."

How to recognize a stream of malicious backlinks?

• Track the dynamics of the link mass through Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console. If it rises without reason and the donor sites look suspicious, someone is trying to set you up.

What to do if you find toxic backlinks?

• Google's Disavow Tool helps. Gather a list of incoming links and upload it. "These are not with me," you tell Google. And it believes you.
• Yandex does not have manual tools, but its algorithms for automatically filtering malicious links work very well.

Toxic links are an old type of fraud, and search engines (for the most part) have learned to identify and neutralize them. Toxic links without direct commercial anchors are unlikely to harm your positions. 

But caution doesn't hurt. The best prevention is to independently build up the link mass with quality backlinks.  

Content Theft

Suppose you decide to write an article for your site. After publication, it is almost immediately copied to a competitor's site.

Any content does not appear in search immediately — first, a robot must crawl the page, analyze it, and save the information. This is called indexing, and it can take several days or even weeks.

If your competitor's site is older and more authoritative, its indexing speed will be higher than yours. As a result, the search engine will consider the competitor the original source, and you will be filtered for duplicating your own content.

How to protect yourself from content theft:

• Immediately after publishing an article, send its URL for forced crawling in Webmaster and Google Search Console. 
• Publish links to the new page with the article on social media — this also increases the indexing speed.

The uniqueness of published content is very important. Also, keep this in mind the next time you decide to post a raw, unedited article from ChatGPT on your site.

Review Terrorism

One of the simplest ways to harm a competitor, and therefore quite common. From purchased (less often — personal) accounts, a mass of negative reviews is written about your organization. Detailed, extensive. Often — with imitation of behavioral factors.

How to recognize commissioned negativity:

• The number of reviews suddenly exceeds the average number per day
• Authors are empty one-day accounts
• Vague wording in the text without specifics (order numbers, receipts, employee names, etc.)
• If a photo is attached to the review, it has nothing to do with your establishment or was created by a neural network.

What to do if negative reviews are ordered against you:

• Write a neutral response, ask for specifics "to better understand the situation." If no receipt or other clarifications of a real incident follow, you have evidence for technical support. File a complaint, appealing specifically to the lack of evidence of a real incident.
• Reviews can be posted not only on Yandex and Google maps but also on various review sites (Otzovik, Yell, etc.). Platform moderators are usually quite open to dialogue and strive to resolve the issue. You can threaten them with a pre-trial claim, but in practice, it rarely comes to that.

Negativity can be deserved. In such a case, resolve the situation with the client and try to get the review removed. Or smooth the situation with the most correct response. 

Some restaurateurs use negativity as fuel for advertising. A familiar owner of a Mexican restaurant recently responded to a review with a complaint about the dish's composition with a very beautiful and interesting video about making a burrito. She proved the client wrong, created content, and advertised herself. Use this life hack.

Spam Through Forms

Spam through application forms is the mass submission of orders through forms on your site. The negative impact is not on the site itself but on the work of the call center or manager on the phone. In the flow of fake applications, a real one can easily be lost.

How to identify spam through application forms:

• Disproportionate influx of applications in a short time
• No one ordered anything by the phone numbers in the applications
• Uniform data (not only by IP addresses but also by lowercase letters in names, for example)

What to do with spam through application forms:

• Temporarily disable automatic submission of applications to CRM or email managers. Let them accumulate in the site's database until you clear the bots.
• Use Honeypot for spam mailings. Simply put, a hidden field for entering information appears in the application form, which only bots will see. This is how they will be filtered out. It will work on most primitive bots.
• Add a captcha. This is not only the search for traffic lights and fire hydrants but also modern systems for analyzing "humanity."
• Add SMS authorization. This will cut off mass spam submissions but slightly complicate the client's path to the application, which may negatively affect conversion.

Newton's third law states: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." For every useful feature you have, there will be a way to use it against you.

For any effective promotion methods, constant monitoring is required, so we always recommend our clients track the useful metrics of their site and take necessary security measures.

The chance of encountering a very persistent but unscrupulous opponent in any business is never zero — whether you are stepping onto the tatami or opening a restaurant.

Let's hope that the knowledge from this article will never be needed.

Best regards,

Victor, SEO Specialist at FoodSoul