Brenden Scott, a University of Bath graduate and former Director of Affiliate Marketing for Clash Media Advertising, makes a living as an SEO consultant with a dark side. “Negative SEO” is the practice of utilizing unethical tactics to attack a competitor’s website ranking with search engines like Google. States Scott, “I understand the rules of search. And once you understand the rules, you can use them not just constructively, but also destructively.” Nice to know there are people in the world like you, Mr. Scott. Now we can add one more thing to our growing list of things-that-make-the-world-suck.

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.