[nekitamo]

Negative SEO only consistently works on smaller sites with a small amount of backlinks (less than 1000). The idea behind negative SEO is to use tools to build a large amount of spammy links, such that 99% of the link profile of a site is obvious spam. This is easily achieved with tools like Xrumrer and Scrapebox. Find a site with 1000 backlinks, build a few hundred thousand spammy backlinks to it, and watch it drop.

To do the same for mattcutts.com you would have to build hundreds of millions spam backlinks to "outspam" his millions of legitimate backlinks. This is nontrivial.

So the people at the mercy of Negative SEO are the people least equipped to defend themselves: small hobby site owners, webmasters with personal blogs, small businesses etc. You can easily knock out their sites from the SERPs and they would never know what happened. Larger sites are secure due to the nature of their large link profiles.

Personally I think all the fear over Negative SEO has been overblown. I've personally been able to knock sites out of the SERPs for a year or so, and so have many other blackhatters. However, people would much rather spend their precious time and resources improving their own sites to get to the top of the SERPs rather than knocking out the competition.

I don't think Negative SEO is ok. But I also don't think it's a big deal.

[Isofarro]

"So the people at the mercy of Negative SEO are the people least equipped to defend themselves: small hobby site owners, webmasters with personal blogs, small businesses etc."

There's a filter you've missed there - those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial gain.

[nekitamo]

"those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial gain."

In practice this is almost never. If you're SEOing in a small niche it's very easy to simply outrank the competition if you know what you're doing. It would take many more resources to knock out the dozen of sites in the SERPs above you, and even if you did it's not guaranteed that your own site would replace them.

The only time you would want to knock out your competition with negative SEO is if you're hovering around 5-10 on a high value high volume keyword, but in the real world sites that rank for those kinds of keywords have millions of legitimate backlinks, and it's next to impossible to negative SEO them.

So personally I've never seen a situation in which the time and resources expended in negative SEO would be justified. Even for reputation management it makes sense to rank dozens of your own sites rather than knock out all the "bad" competing site.

[gabemart]

> If you're SEOing in a small niche it's very easy to simply outrank the competition if you know what you're doing.

Is this really true? I struggle to imagine how generating legitimate and high-value backlinks is easy, even for a small niche.

[nekitamo]

Sadly, spamming backlinks still works fine. You just have to know what you're doing.