After Google’s Penguin update, many webmasters have been discussing how to handle competitors sending links of poor quality towards your website. Many are also asking if it’s possible to harm competing websites by sending 1000′s of links with low trust to hurt competitors. Yes, it is possible to harm some competitors with negative SEO but it’s an unethical method which SEO Specialist doesn’t recommend. After all, you spend a lot of time which don’t gain your own site. Rather use that time building some great content, create guest posts, analyse web statistics or improve your own website. If you never heard of the phenomenon called negative search engine optimisation, here comes a short introduction:

What is negative SEO?

While the practice is still rather unusual, it’s something worth to look out for by checking the latest links in Google Webmaster tools.
• Sending automated backlinks from link networks to a competitor.
• Hacking sites while inserting hidden links pointing to competing websites.
• Often, this practice is done with 1000′s of links with identical backlinks in order to trigger paid links filters by Google.
Have you been a victim for negative SEO? Below is some advice how to proceed.

How to handle negative SEO?

While there are never any guarantee to return without any damage caused, it’s usually better to act quickly. Bing allows website owners to disallow links in their own Bing webmaster tools. Hopefully Google get a similar tool within short. To prevent damage in Google, the best things to do are probably to send a re-inclusion request in Google webmaster tools. Alternatively, you can try some of the link cleanup tools such as Raven SEO Tools, Rmoov.com, Removeem.com, Link Detox by LinkResearchTools.com or request to remove content from Google, which is usually rather hard.