It is quite common. You're safe till you're not caught.
David Liu is right, Google still not have any such mechanism which can instantly identify the bad or good. But what I don't agree with is "obeying the mantra 'build great content and they will come' will take you a long time to get where they are, if it ever does get you there"
Start targeting the top notch blogs in your industry to get referral links and recommendation, and it won't take much time to take you to get where your competitor is. Make sure the content you share bring some value to the blog force readers to share it with their social/ personal network.
My website is Adcart.com, we were no where, some 3 months back, in Google search results. But now you can enter any keyword, which comes to your mind by looking at our website and we rank in first 15 results and in top 10 for almost 90% queries. We just published in 13 high quality articles in exceptionally high quality blogs to achieve these results.