Should You Conduct Negative SEO Against a Competitor?

I can’t believe I just typed this title as my title. But I did. Why? Because I recently read this article and was appalled. Apparently an experiment was recently conducted where 84 small business owners across different industries were emailed to see if they would be interested in hiring a company to perform negative SEO against their competitors. Here are the results:

• 48% said yes
• 31% said they were interested
• and only 21% said no

Alright, so 84 companies doesn’t represent the masses, but none-the-less, the results are alarming.

What is negative SEO?

Negative SEO is the practice of using black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to sabotage a competitor’s search engine rankings. Not only is this an unethical practice (WordPress didn’t let me underline “unethical” 50 times, so once will have to do), but it’s also a crisis waiting to happen. (However, I’d like to add that if you intentionally sabotage someone’s rankings like this, you deserve a crisis in my opinion.)

How much of a crisis, you ask?

Not only would knowledge of your actions threaten to ruin your reputation in the eyes of the public and your stakeholders, but there are other serious long-lasting ramifications that you may potentially face as well, including legal ramifications.

The consequences of performing negative SEO

I asked internet defamation attorney, Whitney C. Gibson, for a better idea of what these legal ramifications could look like. Here’s what he had to say:

“The penalties against an organization for manipulating — or hiring someone to manipulate — search engine results could be severe. Certainly each instance is fact-specific, as well as jurisdiction-specific should a victim bring legal action. Legally, a party harmed by negative SEO practices could potentially bring legal claims against an organization partaking in negative SEO, such as for unfair competition or tortious interference with prospective business, which could result in monetary damages. Additionally, Google and other search engines could enforce their terms of service against an offending organization and go as far as completely removing that organization’s website from their search engine indices.”

So not only could you lose the respect and trust of your stakeholders, but you can get sued AND removed from Google for good. And don’t think that you can hide behind the service provider who’s implementing the actual negative SEO either. Chris Anderson, co-founder of the cyber investigation firm, CIS, says:

“For companies that attack their competitors, they often hire out the negative SEO attacks, thinking this keeps the company from being caught. However, there have been some recent cases where the SEO provider got caught and then provided info about who had hired them.”

So if you’ve been approached by a service provider pitching you the concept of bring your competitors down in the search rankings and are contemplating taking them up on their offer… think long and hard. Is it worth ruining your reputation, suffering through a legal suit and potentially getting removed from the search engines all together? I think not.

Should you plan for this type of risk in your crisis plan?

For all of you ethical readers out there, I know what you’re wondering. Is negative SEO a risk you should plan for? It’s definitely worth being aware of and having a conversation about with your IT department, SEO firm or web agency. An attack like this is apparently easier to prevent than it is to clean up, says Felix Tarcomnicu from KissMetrics. So, when you have this conversation with your web team, be sure to ask them if:

1. They’re aware of this risk; and
2. If they’ve already put some preventative measures in place.

I don’t specialize in SEO but Felix provides detailed tips on how to safeguard your brand from such an attack, over on the KissMetrics blog.