Google, through its recent updates, has taken a definitive stance against poor quality search engine optimization techniques. Tactics such as forum profile links, blog comment links, and links from low quality ‘link farms’ have been getting many sites penalized and subsequently dropped in the search engine page results. Funny enough, even after these update and deliberate outreach by Google to make it known that these link will, in fact, hurt and not help their sites, many SEOs are still recommending using these search engine optimization techniques.

Nonetheless, some internet marketers have used this knowledge of Google’s link preferences and created a growing trend of web warfare against their competing sites. Instead of looking to building links to their sites, they are using negative SEO to bombard their competition’s link profiles with SPAMy links.

By doing this, they are hoping to push the competitors site down in the search rankings, which will make them one step closer to the top. This is a troublesome notion seeing as it will most likely be difficult for Google and other search engines to determine who posted certain links and the intent of the postings. Check out the infographic below regarding an interesting negative SEO study:

Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an
Austin SEO company, To view the original post, see the original Negative SEO Infographic.

As you can see, this approach was not only very succesfull in accomplishing its goal, it was also very inexpensive. I hope, for the sake of simplicity, that this does not become a trend in internet marketing. Undoubtedly, there will be SEOs that deploy these tactics and it is better to know that this is out there if youes site does get effected by something similar.