[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.