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Posted 09 May 2012 19:55pm by Heather Taylor with 0 comments

Negative SEO is not a new concept but it is one that has recently become more mainstream. These are underhanded tactics where companies do SEO activity for their competitors so it appears that they are breaching Google's guidelines and they get penalized.

This SEO campaign then ruins the competitor's organic rankings in order to improve their own rankings. The most common practice is to build low quality, anchor text links to a specific domain in order to trigger a Google penalty for that site or specific page.

We asked some SEO experts in the UK and US their opinions on negative SEO, what techniques are being used and how you can prevent it from happening to you.

It's actually pretty scary at the moment - as there is truth in negative SEO working effectively, see posts like this one from Aaron Wall. Of course Google are looking to favour brands in its search results and big brands will be more protected by this due to the fact that they have authority and more natural back link profiles.

This means that negative links wouldn't stand out as much percentage wise and the strong domain should be enough to protect it from any potential influx of negative links. It's definitely the smaller and less authoritative sites which are at more risk from this.

It is potentially possible...but it is extremely rare. I was chatting to one of the Google Quality team who reckoned they'd only ever seen a couple of cases ever that fell into this category, and they look at thousands of websites a month.

Yes, it is, and the SEO industry chatter on this topic is at its highest level in years. Google has rolled out the Penguin algorithm update on April 24, 2012 which is supposed to target websites that use spammy sources of links. However, the SEO community is in agreement that this update has increased the danger of negative SEO tremendously. Basically, a competitor would be able to engage in tactics that the Penguin update deems spammy and hurt a companys rankings.

Yes I used to believe that the worst case scenario from a negative link would be that it would have no impact. But we've seen a few sites take drops recently and the most obvious explantation is due to negative links. Of course you'd like to think that the only way to get to the top of Google is to focus on yourself and building a brand but you can't be nave to what is actually happening out there and you need to make sure that your site is well protected from any negative SEO activity.

Read the rest here:
The impact of negative SEO: the experts' view