Negative SEO attacks can cost online web owners substantial economic damage in the form of lost visitors and ad revenues. The fact that negative SEO practitioners use misinformation to cause damage to other legitimate businesses is for all intents and purposes criminal behavior. The same might be said for doing the same in order to protect a business of deserved criticism or complaints.

Here are a few of the tricks that are utilized by the negative SEO practitioner to cause undeserved harm to innocent online businesses:

1. Google bowling is a tactic used to create the appearance of link spamming, something that is frowned upon by the search engines, and something that can lead to a significant drop in a site’s rankings. A large number of “spammy” links containing questionable anchor text–e.g., references to porn, etc.– are posted to the target site. With this tactic, the sudden and suspiciously excessive increase in the number of links gets the attention of the search engines, and not in a good way.

2. Tattling capitalizes on the search engines’ disdain for paid links.  Any paid links a website owner may have bought from more established sites are reported to the search engine.  If there are no paid links then the negative SEO practitioner may purchase and report them unbeknownst to the victim.

3. Insulation is accomplished by creating a volume of competing content so great that it eclipses that of the target site.  This may be used, for example, to effectively hide negative crticism or complaints by generating a rediculously large volume of positive comments on competing sites such as forums, blogs, etc.

4. Copyright Takedown Notices are used to effectively shutdown a competing site and have it removed from the search engines’ indexes, at least for 10 days, while the copyright holder decides whether or not to pursue legal action against the alleged infringer.  Since the “infringer”,  in this case, is completely innocent of accusations made by the negative search engine optimizer, valuable time is lost waiting for the 10-day period to elapse.  This is grounds for a lawsuit.

5. Copied content can be used by sites that are older and more established to make the competing site’s corresponding pages disappear.  The search engines don’t like to return duplicate results to users as this tends to dilute the value of the search results.  Efforts are therefore made to determine the original content creator based on the age of the subject sites.

6. Denial of service attacks effectively shut down a competitor’s website by overwhelming the server with more requests for information that it can handle.  These requests are usually coodinated in simultaneous fashion and launched from a network of computers that contain malware.

7. Click fraud is a tactic whereby an automated script is used to artificially accelerate the process of reaching the upper limit of the competing website’s pay-per-click budget by simulating user ad clicks.  This is not only unethical but illegal.

One popular way of doing this is via invisible iframes embedded in popular, high-traffic websites such as gambling sites, forums and shopping sites.  An individual or company joins an affiliate program and then proceeds to acquire multiple hoplinks which are then placed in a webpage. This webpage is then secretly loaded into other webpages within a website via an inconspicuous or invisible iframe.  This allows for all the affiliate cookies to be deposited on your computer without your knowledge. Should you decide at a later point to purchase a product from one of the corresponding merchants, the cookie-depositing perpetrator gets credit for the sale.  And since it’s not uncommon for affiliate cookies to last 120 days or more before expiring, this leaves ample time for the cookies to do their dirtywork.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot that can be done to safeguard against cookie stuffing.  The ultimate solution is one that must be implemented by the merchants themselves by issuing cookies that are not re-writable.  This way, once a visitor has received a cookie from a legitimate affiliate, it cannot be overwritten at a later point should this same visitor land on a page that has been stuffed with illegitimate cookies.

The fact is, anyone can get “on the first page” of Google by simply opening an Adwords account and paying the market rate for a given keyword. Sure enough, your ad will appear somewhere on the first page of results among the SPONSORED listings–probably not what you had in mind when you forked over your hard-earned $600!  The promise of getting listed “on the first page of Google” is presumed to mean getting listed on the first page of natural search results.  The way these shady firms hide behind semantics calls to mind the character Benny Gibbs, who in the movie “Trial and Error” was a con man accused of fraudulently advertising copper engravings of Abraham Lincoln for $17.99.  Customers did in fact receive a copper “engraving” of Abraham Lincoln which, by the way, also happened to be a copper penny!  Sometimes semantics makes all the difference in the world.

The harsh reality is that achieving a true top ranking in the organic search results is most often neither cheap nor easy.  This is not to say that it’s impossible or takes forever; just that it isn’t likely to happen in a few days.  Part of this has to do with how the search engines work.  Google, for example, looks for one-way links, or “backlinks”, from relevant¹ authority sites.  But link-building campaigns, even when aggressively pursued, often start out slow. Webmasters must see the value in your content, which presumes you have content and plenty of it.  They must see how a link to your site adds value to their own.  It’s a process that starts by contacting one webmaster at a time.

So when considering paying an “expert” to accelerate your ranking in the search engines don’t be afraid to press the sales rep for clarification on exactly what is being promised.  Ask clarifying questions and get things in writing.  A little due diligence goes a long way when your hard-earned dollars are at stake.

^{1. Not all externally linking sites must be relevant in subject matter so long as they are quality sites; but all things equal, a link from a relevant site is preferred.}