Aikido with Competitors: Click Fraud and Other Prohibited Techniques

High competition and large transaction amounts drive the faint-hearted to resort to unfair tactics. In the field of internet marketing, fierce battles sometimes unfold, where successful websites suffer from attacks by their “industry colleagues.”

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

There are various approaches. Some are aimed not only at damaging your reputation but also at destroying your website or online advertising. 

It’s important to note that in 8 out of 10 cases when my clients complained about “omnipresent competitors,” the real issue turned out to be unresolved project problems or excessive anxiety. But sometimes, the concerns were indeed justified.

Click Fraud in Yandex Direct

Click fraud is a method of draining a competitor’s budget through advertising. A bot farm or a large group of diligent employees deliberately clicks on Yandex Direct or Google Ads. As a result, your budget is wasted.

Signs of click fraud:

• A sudden spike in CTR without an increase in leads
• A large number of bounces with visits lasting 0-2 seconds
• Suspicious geography and timing: clicks occur at night when you’re not advertising, and users are from non-target regions
• Matching IP addresses

Yandex and Google are aware of this problem, but it’s still impossible to solve it completely. About 25% of fraudulent clicks slip through the filters. That’s why you need to take the initiative.

What to do to fight click fraud:

• Contact technical support. Sometimes this helps, but you need irrefutable evidence (screenshots of suspicious activity, bot IP addresses, etc.).
• If bot traffic comes from the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN), block non-target sites with a 100% bounce rate.
• Use anti-fraud services. They analyze every click and automatically block bots.

Negative Manipulation of Behavioral Factors

For search engines, user behavior on a website is critically important. The sum of user actions is called behavioral factors.

A client visits the site, scrolls through pages, clicks buttons, reads an article — good.

A client visits the site, doesn’t find what they’re looking for, and immediately returns to search — bad.

In the second case, the search engine interprets that the site poorly satisfies user queries and lowers its ranking. Using bots that imitate poor behavioral factors can significantly damage a site’s reputation.

How to recognize negative manipulation of behavioral factors:

• An increase in the bot activity metric
• A significant rise in short visits without clicks

How to fight negative manipulation of behavioral factors:

• A proven method: Cloudflare and other anti-fraud services block automated visits to your site.

Toxic Links

This was once a common way to sink competitors in search rankings. A backlink is a link from an external site to your own. The number 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 spammy sites, which do more harm than good, cost just a few rubles. This is what attackers exploit.

With a special malicious script, a victim site can quickly be burdened with hundreds of toxic links from 18+ sites, online casinos, and similar sources. The search engine receives a red flag and lowers the site’s ranking as “contaminated.”

How to recognize a stream of malicious backlinks?

• Monitor your backlink profile dynamics via Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console. If it suddenly increases for no 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. Collect the list of incoming links and upload it there. “These are not mine,” you tell Google. And it believes you.
• Yandex doesn’t have manual tools, but its automatic algorithms for filtering harmful links work very well.

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

But caution never hurts. The best prevention is to build up your backlink profile with high-quality links yourself.  

Content Theft

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

Any content doesn’t appear in search instantly—a bot must first crawl the page, analyze it, and store 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 may consider the competitor the original source, and you may be penalized for duplicating your own content.

How to protect yourself from content theft:

• Immediately after publishing an article, submit its URL for forced crawling in Webmaster and Google Search Console.
• Share links to the new article page on social media—this also speeds up indexing.

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

Review Terrorism

One of the easiest ways to harm a competitor, and therefore quite common. A mass of negative reviews is written about your organization from purchased (or less often, personal) accounts. These reviews are detailed and elaborate, often imitating behavioral factors.

How to recognize fake negative reviews:

• The number of reviews suddenly exceeds the average daily count
• Authors are empty, one-day-old 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 AI.

What to do if you’re targeted with negative reviews:

• Write a neutral response, ask for specifics “to better understand the situation.” If there’s no receipt or other clarification of a real incident in response, you have evidence for technical support. File a complaint, specifically citing the lack of proof of a real event.
• Reviews can appear not only on Yandex and Google Maps but also on various review sites (Otzovik, Yell, etc.). Platform moderators are usually open to dialogue and try to resolve the issue. You can threaten them with a pre-trial claim, but in practice, it rarely comes to that.

Negative feedback can be well-deserved. In that case, resolve the situation with the client and try to get the review removed. Or smooth things over with the most polite response possible. 

Some restaurateurs use negative feedback as fuel for advertising. A friend who owns a Mexican restaurant recently responded to a complaint about a dish’s ingredients with a beautiful and engaging video about making burritos. She proved the customer wrong, created content, and got herself some publicity. Use this life hack.

Spam Through Forms

Spam through application forms is the mass submission of orders via forms on your website. The negative impact is not on the site itself, but on the call center or phone manager. In a flood of fake requests, a real one can easily get lost.

How to identify spam through application forms:

• A disproportionate surge in requests in a short period
• The phone numbers in the requests have never actually placed an order
• Uniform data (not only by IP addresses, but also by lowercase letters in names, for example)

What to do about spam through application forms:

• Temporarily disable automatic forwarding of requests to CRM or to managers’ emails. Let them accumulate in the site’s database until you clear out the bots.
• Use a Honeypot for spam mailings. Simply put, a hidden field appears in the application form that only bots will see. This is how they are filtered out. It works for most primitive bots.
• Add a captcha. This is not only the classic search for traffic lights and fire hydrants, but also modern systems for analyzing “humanity.”
• Add SMS authorization. This will block mass spam submissions, but it will also make the application process more difficult for clients, 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 implement, there will be a way to use it against you.

Any effective promotion method requires constant monitoring, so we always recommend our clients track their site’s key metrics and take necessary security measures.

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

Let’s hope you’ll never need the knowledge from this article.

Best regards,

SEO Specialist, FoodSoul