So whats stopping one of your competitors firing a load of spam links to your site & penalizing it?

Good question!

The corollary is what are you doing to counteract said actions?

The answers lie somewhere in the middle and somewhere out beyond yonder... In the Twilight Zone

First of all, show a site that has suffered these actions and the outcomes, fully documented. Then show those docs to Google. And then show them here.

I can totally see such a sick campaign as working against the antagonist at some point of time in the future. That's how stuff like that tends to turn out.

It's much the same mindset as MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction as practised in the 50's to 80's between communist USSR and USA. In any niche worth its sort, there are the top players. They know the status quo and are usually happy to play it out.

Google also knows the status quo at any given time (determined over years) so I think, is apt to play along. It's much more about maintaining the quo at the top of the camp than crucifying any particular entity at whim. There is collateral damage, of course. There are take-overs and reprisals, of course. There are pretenders to the throne, always. When you think about it - none of the off-site "amendments" that *could* be made, matter that much if certain over-riding signals that determine the search top spots are not affected. Let's just say if you maintain a presence, you'll receive the benefits of that presence even when under attack.

Simplified, but I think that's generally what happens.

Nothing is protecting you. The only protection you have is your brain, your thirst for competition, buffer sites, and good old blackhat SEO.

If someone neg SEO's my site, I'll neg SEO every site on page 1 of Google.

And since I keep duplicates of all my money sites (not duplicate content just back up sites ready for launch) I will rerank a new site right back to #1, and I'll continue to neg SEO every mfkr on page 1 of Google. I will repeat this process for a year straight, until all my competitors tire out, have nervous break downs, go bankrupt, and start living on the streets.

The short answer again: You can't stop it.
The solution: Always be prepared for a war before a war starts.

Nothing. Absolutly nothing and you can't 'protect yourself' you have to just deal with it when it happens or hope your site is strong enough and your attacker has ADHD.

Not relying on Google is the greatest protection of all from 'Neg SEO.'

Despite what you read on Marketing forums - Something IS in some cases stopping it and its pretty obvious. Negative SEO has been possible for at least a year and a half but people are acting like its just come and it means the world is going to end. If it was then the world should have ended a yea ago.

There was a long old cases study last year at TP with Thies (as the site owner), a user named Negative SEO and Fishkin of Moz. If you ask marketers they found the case study convincing but the owner wasn't anywhere near as impressed. Frankly in the end Thies probably came out ahead.

Regardless of what you think of the study ( It did have some very major flaws). it was done a year and a half ago. Theres no doubt tht it works on some sites but theres really no doubt either that it doesn't work on all sites. Why? Other studies have shown no results

Negative SEO Reality Check - True Story & Case Study

Even more telling than the studies is the reality of the search results. If all the hype you hear about negative SEO were true and you could take down any site ahead of you and rule Google then why in over a year and half has that not happened? Google's results should be a mess - so big even in high traffic sarches that people should be screaming at Google and running to Bing.

No one can answer this.

It just aint happening

Not enough people have the idea? Bzz false. The idea has been around to rank that way for well over a year.

Marketers are to moral and ethical to rank that way7? LOL

Not enough tools and VPS resources? Marketers? :p

Its pretty obvious really. Although negative SEO is possible under a great many circumstances, the idea that you can just look at any serp and target any sites in front of you in order to rule is mostly -

a myth..

Point of correction, this is no longer news. The first panda update took place on Feb 17th 2011.

Some idiots think negative SEO will help them stay afloat.

I still wonder how people think they can live comfortably under a burning roof both parties help destroyed.

Believe me, most people who neg SEO competitors site never get the chance to rank for their keywords again.
It's a poor and naive marketing strategy and such people have no damn clue about what SEO is.

First of all, Google knows about this and is no fool.

Google disavow helps you disregards and clean up your profile.

I have also seen cases where only a bunch of high quality, relevant network links got a site back after neg rep.

A site with a ton of legit links, like some "authority" type of site can handle a lot of spam without being negatively affected.

Most sites, especially the ones from local businesses or small webshops can be taken down very easily.

Batten down the hatches. Prepare for negative SEO before it happens to you. That means building other traffic sources and building out the trust & brand signals that make authority sites more bullet proof. Get your social on, if your business is one that can be reviewed get lots of good (legitimate) reviews, get listed in reputable directories relevant to your niche. Think : Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce and local press for Local sites. For online only get links from authority sites in your niche, go big on social signals and have great user experience.

If you prepare for the worst you might weather the storm and if you lose Google traffic you will at least have your other traffic to stay afloat.

With a new site tho you Disavow, nothing to lose. Well the time and effort you've put in so far but it's not like a site that you've built over years. For a new site I'd wait til I got an unnatural links warning in WMT then Disavow all that garbage. If you have set the site up right, haven't done anything spammy to date and have earned at least a little credit with Google then maybe you survive it.

The problem with negative SEO as I see it is that it is most dangerous to new sites and sites where no SEO work has been done at all. Neither has actually done anything wrong (yet.) Both are already vulnerable and fairly easy to outrank so why pile this on them too?

I'm really hoping someone can make an automated disavow tool that will submit disavow requests for new links so I can leave it running and then tell it which links to keep when I add new links. Call it 'LinkShield' or something. Get on it warriors.

Or maybe google should just pull their head out from their arse and just make spammy backlinks worthless instead of penalize them.

I think it ultimately comes down to the updates only pick up some sites and not all, so you might actually rank your competitor lol so its like throwing a coin in the air and calling it.

Nothing. I could literally take down any sites SEO rankings unless they are super duper authority site (Think wikipedia, bbc etc)

All you need is scrapebox, xrumer, and bad blog networks. Virtually NOTHING is immune.

You think im kidding? Suggest me your site and ill throw 500k links in a day at it and we will see

Not saying its an ethical practice to neg people, or that i do it. But its really not that hard.

2 cents.

Nothing is stopping them.

Whats really stopping someone is business ethics. Unfortunately some people's ethics dont really exist.

The only thing you can do is proactively watch your link profile.

I am honestly a bit astonished... and for this reason, I dare raising this one simple (but for me quite obvious) question: why would anyone do negative SEO in the first place? I know - I might be 'blue eyed' - but come on: why ? Greed... maybe. Jealousy... quite obviously. Stupidity... absolutely! I like the word 'business ethics' - people who do this negative thing to others should have a good hard look at their on sh... and try to make it better before hurting others. - end of rant... :-)

Im not even sure how this is a debatable topic at this point homey.

It's this simple, do linkbuilding Google penalties exist? Of course. That's not even a debate as I received a penalty myself for unnatural links.

Now did Google have proof I built these links? No way. They assumed based on the fact that who else would buy links to my website? In their mind negative seo is done on such a small scale that it doesn't matter if a few negative situations occur as long as the algorithm as a whole works.

Negative seo does work and its very easy to do as long as the website doesn't have a signifcant backlink profile to begin with. Want to know the trick? Do really dumb SEO that a newbie with a big budget would do to try and rank a website. Give it some time and Google's algo will do the rest.

Based on some experiments I have run with some throwaway sites, there is nothing to stop this. $200 worth of random Fiverr SEO gigs should do the trick.

The only protection seems to be domain authority. The big and old authority sites seem to be immune to link spam, in fact it seems to help them.

I don't see a lot of negative SEO, but I'm sure it happens in some industries.

Here's what Matt Cutss says about the issue. Fast forward to 3:20 to get the meat.

Negative SEO - YouTube