Isn't Negative SEO Illegal?

[JimR]

Hey guys, kinda noob to the SEO scene but I'm definitely learning a lot, especially thanks to this site.

I was told there's a company in Colorado that specifically focuses on negative seo. Isn't this illegal? Just curious how a company that admittedly does this could stay in business?

 

[PBNbros]

Yes definitely illegal. You can be fined up to $250,000 and 10 years in prison.

 

[mickyfu]

Well hopefully one day they will end up with a case on their hands for openly admitting to sabotaging people's businesses.

 

[propipper]

Illegal? More unethical. That the question but does this company perform negative SEO or does it help sites that have been targeted by negative SEO?

 

[Chavalalhazman]

Unethical and illegal if it can be proven.

And I would say that the vast majority of amateurish attempts at negseo are easily provable if you have deep enough pocket.

If however someone who know what they are doing carries it out, the chances of average joe in discovering who did it, let alone prove it, is almost zero.

Cant post a link but search for legality of negative seo and you should see quite a good blog post from Reboot Online which has some law experts from US and UK discuss this.

 

[CyberHour]

There is no such animal .

Most of the times doing "negative seo" actually boost the rank of the targeted competitor. Waste of money and time.

 

[mickyfu]

There is no such animal .

Most of the times doing "negative seo" actually boost the rank of the targeted competitor. Waste of money and time.

How can it possibly not exist? If SEO exists and algo updates exist, and websites dropping in rankings exist, then neg Seo exists.

 

[stevesolo]

Definitely, it's illegal. Better to stop now itself.

 

[aidenhera]

neg seo is not hard, why buy from someone lol. i neg seoed most of my past websites effectively so people paying for that are dumb. low interest=no need to take action. but probably if there was more interested people, they would be hunt down by google. (eg they try to hunt paid links cause its big problem).

but i dont see how that could be illegal. easy to prove yes. but still legal.

 

[mickyfu]

neg seo is not hard, why buy from someone lol. i neg seoed most of my past websites effectively so people paying for that are dumb. low interest=no need to take action. but probably if there was more interested people, they would be hunt down by google. (eg they try to hunt paid links cause its big problem).

but i dont see how that could be illegal. easy to prove yes. but still legal.

I'm pretty sure that purposely ruining someone's business is not legal.

 

[aidenhera]

I'm pretty sure that purposely ruining someone's business is not legal.

its not ruining someones businesses. its making trashy links. no paragraph for that.

i could be telling all my friends your business s*ck a lot and that is still legal so there legal forms of ruining someones business

 

[Shree]

I guess it's technically illegal - but it may not be very easy to sue a company / individual for negative SEO.

If a competitor hacks another's website - and it can be proven - that's a different matter.

But if someone just builds low quality links to a competitor's site, I guess it will be harder to quantify the damages done by those links to the website.

How do you prove in a court that those links caused a drop in rankings? What if the site was receiving hardly any traffic to start with? Even otherwise, there can be several reasons why a site's rankings and traffic can drop.

Anyway, it would be far better to play fair. And you can sleep more peacefully at night ... at least, your conscience will not prick you

 

[Sristy]

Though illegal it is the most difficult to prove this at any point hence there exists a market for this.

 

[mickyfu]

its not ruining someones businesses. its making trashy links. no paragraph for that.

i could be telling all my friends your business s*ck a lot and that is still legal so there legal forms of ruining someones business

You obviously have no clue what neg seo is. For a start one of the most effective ways of neg seo is a ddos attack. Ask Charlie floate how legal that is.

And yes, it is purposely ruining someone's business.

 

[jazzc]

Unless there's an actual case where this has been settled on court and can be used as a precedent, it's a gray area.

 

[aidenhera]

You obviously have no clue what neg seo is. For a start one of the most effective ways of neg seo is a ddos attack. Ask Charlie floate how legal that is.

And yes, it is purposely ruining someone's business.

there are hostings with anti ddos like ovh. unless someone has very big botnet thats not really that common to break ovh anti ddos, i saw one documented downing ovh on twitter probably by mirai botnet but i didnt go deeper in that

but i believe we are talking about backlinks in this thread, so its legal

 

[mickyfu]

No we are talking about neg seo

 

[german seo]

Isn't this illegal?

I would highly doubt it. First of all, Big G is claiming that's very unlikely to non-existing and not a single case is documented. Secondly nobody knows how the algo actually works, so it's impossible to prove the ranking dropped therefore. And third, you don't posses a ranking, so I highly doubt you have any right on it or can claim theft.

 

[MisterF]

Some peoples idea of neg seo is sending 50k spammy xrumer links to a competitors site.

If you're looking at a proper DDOS then that is one of those types of attacks that would get the authorities interested, depending on which sites you are going after.

 

[Nargil]

Unless there's an actual case where this has been settled on court and can be used as a precedent, it's a gray area.

This applies just to common law systems, like US + Comonwealth, even though European countries are adapting the precedent system to some extent.

About the legality, yes, you are causing a damange to someone elses business and it goes to civil and in some cases (depending on the size of the damage), even into criminal law.

However, having laws is an amazing thing, especially, if you can't enforce them. Which is a case here. There's no way in the world that anyone can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the neg SEO was pulled off by you. However, the requirement for reasonable doubt falls only to criminal court. Before the civil court, whatever is more probable, wins. However, proving it even here would be prett hard, unless the guy who pulls off the neg SEO is an utter fucktard.