Thanks for the link.

Have bookmarked this page.

One black hat technique linked with this that i have been reading however (Negative SEO) looks at taking your competitions link and placing it on “spammy” websites to try and get them banned, a pretty sly way of working to be honest. But it does happen unfortunatly.

If your interested a very useful link for you to Matt Cutts of Google talking about a range of different topics: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

Just wanted to clarify this a bit more after thinking about your comment.

By “linking to”, in this case I mean, if you were doing a link exchange with another website.

Otherwise, as you are probably thinking, if it was a straight link situation, your competitors could use this technique to get you banned or penalised , just by linking to you from one of their bad sites.

Another point worth mentioning, is that you need to be careful when you link to other websites.

The reason being, even if you only use white hat or grey hat techniques for yuour site optimization beware. If one of those sites you are linked to is using blackhat techniques and gets banned by Google, you could get penalised as well.

Many good sites get problems because of this and wonder what they have done. It’s an easy trap to fall into, so be careful who you link to!

Mike