{"id":1765,"date":"2014-06-17T06:12:52","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T06:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/?p=1765"},"modified":"2014-06-19T19:01:10","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T19:01:10","slug":"negative-seo-possible-need-irrefutable-public-example","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/negative-seo-possible-need-irrefutable-public-example\/","title":{"rendered":"If Negative SEO is Possible, We Need an Irrefutable, Public Example"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a tremendous number of claims from across the search marketing world that negative SEO (the practice of knocking someone else’s website\/page(s) out of search results by pointing spam links at them) is not only possible, but has been done. One of the most recent and, IMO, most credible came via this SERoundtable post<\/a> (where 48% of respondents to a poll said they were personally able to knock a competitor out of the rankings).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, what we don’t have is a solid, compelling, public example that proves the risk and helps unite the industry and press to nudge Google into making changes.<\/p>\n

\"aknockout\"
\nvia K. James<\/a> on Flickr<\/sub><\/p>\n

It’s my belief that even a single public example of an innocent website – one that’s never engaged in active SEO or link building – getting removed from the search results through third-party action would be strong encouragement to Google’s search quality and webspam teams to revise their current practices. I’m passionate about this because I don’t believe that the status quo of forcing site owners to police their own links through Webmaster Tools is fair, viable, or moral. Google managed spam for a decade without requiring site owners to live in constant fear of links that might harm them, and I think they can manage it just fine again.<\/p>\n

Here’s the required ingredients:<\/p>\n