awesome ! how come no one talk about it here ?
how can i harm a website rank with backlinks ?
At one time it was against the rules to talk about negative SEO. Not sure if that is still the case. Also there is disagreement about whether or not it's even possible. And, amongst those that believe that it is possible, there is disagreement on it's long-term effect. A ScrapeBox blast might get a site demoted for a while, but some believe that it can come back stronger than ever. Somehow those spammy backlinks ultimately can be good for a site.
And then there is the strategic disagreement. While some say there is positive benefit to be gained by running a negative SEO campaign, other say that the time & energy spent doing that would be better spent doing positive SEO for your own site. I call this one the "World Full of Competitors" argument, and their reasoning is that for every competitor that you knock down, there are hundreds more that can take their place. Those that disagree with that believe that it's possible to knock-off a higher-ranked competitor and simply move up one spot, as if the competition for the ranking is static.
And then, finally, you get into the ethics of the matter. Some believe in a more blackhat, "all is fair in love and war" belief, and also "don't bring a knife to a gunfight", while others think that anyone that would run a negative SEO campaign is a low-life motherfucker. So you might want to be careful coming out in favor of it, because you might earn the disdain of those that think this way.
And as for myself, in a local context, well I am quite proud of the fact that I discovered a competitor for one of my clients doing blackhat techniques to beat my client in the Local Search Results, and I reported this to Google and 4 days later they were knocked WAY back to page 4 or so.
HAH. Gives me a stiffie just thinking about it. Aaand I don't give a shit what other people think about it, either. Local is a completely different universe from global. In global competition, your competitors are all manner of godless heathens from misbegotten hell-holes all over the world; places like Antarctica, the Gobi desert, and Canada, and those people deserve whatever they get. However, local competition is with your Neighbors, the people right down the street, that know you, know your name, your kids names, where you live and they can burn down your house in the middle of the night. So you better not fuck with them. Most particularly, me.