Preemptively defending against negative SEO

Ok right I'm looking at setting up a major project in the upcoming months.

It will take the niche I'm in to a new level and should be widely popular however its a niche in which everyone knows each other. And well I'm going to be treading on toes of people I've already pissed off.

Honestly I can see negative seo attacks being used as a tactic against me. What can I do to shore up a new domain (although I'm writing the site I've yet to think of a brand name and domain.)

Having an affilaite program (again this will be written from scratch in node) will be fairly crucial from the get go (and will be used to sweeten up those in the niche who currently don't monetise it). So I'm aware there will be a lot of links swimming about (do search engines consider affiliate links spam - will they impact the mothersite?).

The aim at the start is not to get to the top of google its simply just not to get blacklisted to oblivion.

Get high quality links from authoritative sources. That's one of the sure ways to fight negative seo. Your competitors can spam your site all day long if they want, but if you have HQ links in your portfolio indicating that you are a worthy site (in Google's eyes at least), Google will simply ignore the links. If you don't yet have the authority or can't get links, then it becomes super tricky and difficult, because you have to tweak the content in your page. Assuming the attack is made right (by spamming you with exact/partial match anchors in non-related sites), you will have to change the densities of most keywords while still keeping the article top-notch for visitors, which is extremely hard, even for the best writers as they are not used to someone telling them "write these many words, include this but not that, etc...). So, I recommend you go with the first option.

I'd recommend securing as many social media, video sharing, image, and top hosted blog site properties as possible in advance. Grab the exact match and any common misspellings on each of these even if you don't plan to use them. Quite a few tactics used in Negative SEO tend to be around registering yourwebsite.tumblr.com or yourwebsite.wordpress.com or squatting social media names and posting defamatory information on them. Over the years I've had this happen many times, its a shame to see.