Negative SEO... Fact or fiction???

So, I'm wondering if it possible to damage my site by buying crummy backlinks.

And if so, what is to stop me from damaging my competitors website with crummy backlinks?

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

 

Negative SEO is certainly a possibility with the newer Panda / Penguin updates. However trying to damage your competitiors website is useless for the following reasons:

• While you are builiding negative links to your competitor's website they are building quality links that will offset your linkbuilding efforts, so essentailly you are wasting your time.
• While you are building links to their website you most likley are lacking on linkbuilding for your own website!
• Even if you succedd with lowering your competitiors rankings, a different competitor will certianly take their spot because you have focused all your time on their negative SEO and not on your postive SEO so you are back to square one!!

The bottom line is instead of wasting your time, do a little research and develop some amazing content that will go viral and build links for you! That is the real key to SEO. Instead of manually building links everyday, focus on creating link-worthy content (I.E. infographics, industry trends, etc...) that will go viral across the net. The effects of this are the single fastest way to become an authority in your industry and rank above all your competitors!

I hope this helps clear things up for you.

~Nick B.

P.S. If this post helped you, consider adding reputation to my profile so that I know I am helping fellow members, and you can tweet any other questions you have to my twitter @NickBordeau for faster responses and more info!

 

So your point is that in the 5 seconds it takes to order 1000 spammy backlinks to my competitors site, I could have spent that time building some valuable content like an infographic on my website?
I could also spend that 5 seconds reading War And Peace, or doing some interpretive dance perhaps...

Respectfully, I think your point is illogical.
People don't spend all their time creating good content, and good backlinks.

The question of Negative SEO is about if it is possible to do major damage to a websites ranking with very little effort. If it is possible, then, unfortunately, it will most certainly be worth it for many people.

 

I understand your point here, but my idea is to build your own brand instead of trying to trash your competitors. I am sure there is some fail-safe for Google to accomodate for this kind of activity.

In fact with recent updates, Google never penalized any websites for having spammy links. What was done is the de-indexed these links and de-valued them so that they did not count towards any websites reputation or PR. So in the long run you would simply be wasting money.

To make this stand out let me demonstrate:

If you COMPETITIOR A's link profile that looks like:

• Quality Link
• Quality Link
• Spammy Link (You Built)
• Spammy Link (You Built)
• Quality Link
• Spammy Link
• (Spammy Link (You Built)

All that the recent changes did were change that profile to this:

• Quality Link
• Quality Link
• Quality Link

Does that make more sense now?

~Nick B.

 

yes, it is possible and i'm sure there are some who would be desperate enough to do that as well. however, i'm a strong believer of karma and believe that what goes around comes around. i welcome all competition and if my competitor is ahead of me in the game, then they must deserve it which will gain my respect.

 

I think more appropriately is that Google is starting to discount spammy links. You can try bombarding your competitor with spammy links, but if he is higher than you, which probably why you hate him in the first place, you can bet that he is also has strong "good links" which may or may not offset your spammy and probably un-indexed links.

 

negative SEO works.., here is the live example done by a user and posted his experience over it.. check this out.., http://goo.gl/tkAGp

hope this example clarifies your query!

 

How many links did the site already have? This seems like a very small experiment with a very small scale website. I mean the search term only has 249K exact match competition.

 

I believe it may be possible, but only if the competitor site is very weak (has few links) or was borderline-spammy already. If a site has a strong backlink profile, spam links won't hurt them. I think the concern is very overblown.

 

After newer panda and panguin, how can a website owner protect him from this kind of attack ??

 

if you see the stats of it.., it has domain age of 3 years, well established site.., had some backlinks (don't know the exact num).., may be its a small scale but negative seo is working right..,

 

hi priya..,

this is a confusing part for every SE Optimizer.., the thing is that you need to be keep a track of your backlinks / work done for your website all the time.., so that if anything goes wrong, you can check if it is from your side or from any competitor..,

one more thing, we need to be develop by which google can treat us a authoritative website & also need to follow all the guidelines of SE..,

any insights on this..,

 

I dont think so that crummy links can effect competitor website and if you are using black hat technique then it will effect your site might be now or when it is caught by google. You are safe until you are not caught by google bot else you have to suffer a lot.

 

Before you start doing negative SEO, you should know why to use this tactic. There are three major cases where negative search engine optimization is used:

1. To downgrade competitor's website
2. To bury bad or worst news about your company, brand or about yourself
3. Target negative SEO attack on the site

I hope this will help you know a little information why such negative SEO is used.

 

Negative seo considers as black hat technique. Once Google panda or penguin update comes to know about your site they surely ban your site if your site has negative qualities.

 

I agree with you here, but this is in my mind saying that because I can pick up a pebble I should be able to pick up a boulder.

I would be interested in seeing this same experiment run on an average website that is a PR 4 with about 20,000 backlinks. I think that is about the average size of a normal competitor in a small niche.

Another question I have is how diverse were the sidebar (how many different sites were used) links as they seem to be the largest contributing factor? What would stop the website owner simple emailing/calling the webmaster of those sites and removing the sidebar links?

Regardless great work! It does certainly show that Negative SEO is possible. Like I said though I would rather focus my efforts on building a brand instead.

~Nick B.

 

It could probably affect you, but I imagine not that bad, because if so then we could just blast bad links at our competitors. The main thing you should focus on is variety of links and slow natural speed. Good luck

 

@Boruduhh...,
I think it also works for the PR4 and 20,000 backlinks, if the same experiment is doubled and blasted.. but if site has strong backlink profile.., I can't say whether it works or not?
Yes, the webmaster can do that.. because most of the websites which are blasted are on the same IP.., so, they can be removed easily...but in coming days google is updating its algo "with ignore links which we tell" http://goo.gl/Jo2NC ..,

if any webmaster does the same thing with his competitors, he can have option to tell google to ignore..,

yep, rather focusing on the competitor developing our brand is a very much wise decision..

 

This is one of the most interesting topic I have ever read in Digital Point. Based on the reading I think negative seo can impact/affect a little on websites which doesn't have bunch of quality backlinks already.