Recent changes by Google have created a boom in the SEO industry, but perhaps not quite the one Google engineers envisioned.  Google has been fighting a losing battle against “web spam” for many years, and this motivated them to engage in more aggressive tactics to keep their search results clean.  In the past, Google stated that there was nothing that a competitor could do to hurt your rankings in their search engine, but a few years ago they updated it to add “almost”:

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.

“Almost” means that it can be done, and in business when something can be done and there is profit to be made in doing it — it will be done.

On 30 March of 2012, Matt Cutts weakened Google’s messaging on this topic even further, saying:

Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.

Now Google isn’t saying that they can succeed in preventing competitors from harming a web sites rankings, only that they “work hard” to do so. In other words, Google is failing completely, but wants credit because they “work hard.”

Worse, Matt Cutts goes on to give “advice” which is completely out of touch with the reality of the World Wide Web today:

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.

Matt should know that most webmasters cannot be contacted.  This is because posting working contact information on a web site is opening yourself up to a firehose of spam. In response to a deluge of “link request” emails, most webmasters simply stop accepting or reading email from people they do not know.

One of the most egregious examples of how impossible it is to remove links to your site is Google’s own Blogspot domain.  Blogspot customers cannot be contacted and Google refuses to remove links from Blogspot pages.  Therefore, once a competitors places “spammy” links to your site on a Blogspot domain Google (the search engine) will penalize your web site until the links are removed and Google (the owner of Blogspot) will refuse to remove the links.

Google tells site owners to contact webmasters who link to them, and then refuses to allow themselves to be contacted regarding links on their own web properties.  This is the absolute height of corporate hypocrisy.

Negative SEO Case Studies

Negative SEO has actually worked for several years now, but in the past it was far more difficult and expensive. In most cases, it was more cost effective for even a purely blackhat webmaster to promote his own sites than to demote a competitors site.  Google’s recent algorithmic changes have flipped those economics upside down.  It is now so easy (and inexpensive) to get a competitors web site penalized that it actually makes business sense to do so.

Due to legal risks and risks of retribution, almost all negative SEO campaigns are conducted in the shadows.  Almost no information about negative SEO campaigns ever becomes public.  However, the experimental SEO’s at TrafficPlanet have just published two case studies of negative SEO working, and working relatively easily, in the real world. They managed to seriously damage the rankings of justgoodcars.com and seofaststart.com with surprisingly little effort. These case studies should awaken the entire web publishing industry to the risks resulting from Google’s algorithmic weaknesses.

Negative SEO Tactics

There are many negative SEO tactics, because blackhat SEO’s are often very creative.  Here are the current top three tactics.

Building “Unnatural” Links

Building unnatural links is best way to get a competitors web site penalized. This can be done by buying links, either directly or through companies which specialize in link buying.  Or, you can sign up for a link network like ALN, BuildMyRank, or LinkVana. You can also spam your competitors links across the web with simple tools like Scrapebox and SENuke. You can even hire people to do this for you at sites like SEOClerks.

The most dangerous part of this technique is that Google will demand that the site owner remove the links, but because the site owner did not create the links, he cannot remove them.

If your competitor is a well-known firm, you can ratchet up the pressure by building spammy links to them and then “outing” them publicly as a link buyer.  This is like committing a crime and framing your victim for it — and it’s almost impossible to get caught.

Filing Fake Paid Link Reports

Another less discussed form of negative SEO consists of sending fake paid link reports to Google. This is done by analyzing a competitors backlinks with a tool like Majestic, spotting links that look like they might be paid, and then reporting those to Google as paid links.

There’s no way to tell definitely if a link is paid or not, so your accusation can never really be disproved. Your competitor is guilty until proven guilty.

Sending Fake Link Removal Requests

This is the most powerful negative SEO technique to date, and it doesn’t even involve Google directly.  When Google started spreading FUD about web sites being penalized for low-quality links, many site owners responded by sending emails to webmasters linking to them — asking them to remove links.  The emails look something like this one:

Dear site owner,

As you may be aware there have been some recent Google updates which have prompted us to actively review links to our web site.

Our research has identified your site as one which links to us and we would like to request that you remove the links that exist on the following pages:

example.com/example1.html

example.com/example2.html

If you could please advise once this request has been actioned, I would greatly appreciate it. Alternatively if you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

In a negative SEO campaign, the blackhat SEO registers a Gmail account and sends these requests to every site which links to his competitor. The loss of inbound links causes the competitor’s web site to drop in the search engine results and the blackhat’s site moves up in response.

Protection Against Negative SEO

The first question most webmasters ask is “How do I protect myself from negative SEO?” Unfortunately, the answer is that you very likely cannot protect yourself.

The only protection against negative SEO is to be a brand name that Google trusts. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” If Google trusts you and your domain, they won’t allow negative SEO tactics to cause your site to be penalized.  If your web site is not a household name however, you are pretty much defenseless against negative SEO tactics. You can’t prove that you didn’t build those links and Google has no motivation to try to determine the truth. Your beloved web site is just part of the Internet that Google sees as “the cesspool”.