Negative SEO

Forbes.com has an article called The Saboteurs of Search which contains a slideshow of “7 Ways your Site Can be Sabotaged”.

They quoted Matt Cutts:

Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”

Defense against “negative SEO” involves knowing how it is performed. I’ve categorized this post under Site Analysis because it involves things you might look for when analyzing a site.

This is Forbes.com’s list of the 7 ways to sabotage a Web site:

1. Google Bowling — Creating many low-quality inbound links to a site. Easy to discover.
2. Tattling — Reporting paid links to Google through a spam report. If you don’t buy links, it probably isn’t a problem. People who would use the dark side of SEO probably buy links also.
3. Google Insulation — Creating content that ranks above the competitor’s site.
4. Copyright Takedown Notices — Reporting another Web site for copyright infringement can have it taken down for 10 days. This is probably illegal and opens the perpetrator to lawsuits.
5. Copied Content — Creating duplicate content. More difficult to trace, but you can defend against it by monitoring for duplicate content. If they are using proxies to duplicate your content you can send alternate content to the proxies by IP address.
6. Denial of Service — Crash the Web site with a DOS attack. Definitely illegal.
7. Click Fraud Simulate click fraud on competitor’s Web site.

Has anyone been affected by these techniques, or know of any others?

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