Protecting against negative SEO: technical details from Google

Negative SEO involves the tactic of harming competitors by mass building low-quality links. The idea is to trick Google into thinking that the competitor is trying to spam and exclude them from the search results. This practice emerged in the mid-2000s, especially in the online gaming industry, where the rewards for high rankings are high and competition is fierce.

"Around the time we released Penguin, there were tons and tons of tons of complaints about negative SEO, specifically link based negative SEO and then very un-smartly, I requested examples like show me examples, like show me how it works and show me that it worked." - Gary Illies

🚀 So, Gary Illies, talking about his experience handling negative SEO cases that came to him, noted that out of hundreds of cases reviewed, only one could be a real negative SEO case, but the webspam team still wasn't 100% sure. He also noted that the fear of negative SEO is often exaggerated, because Google disables an incredible number of links.

• 📌 Negative SEO is an attempt to undermine a competitor's reputation using spam links.
• 📌 Google is actively working on detecting and disabling such links.
• 📌 There are algorithms that analyze the context of the linking site and the purpose of the site they point to.