Some SEO's in the past have employed methods that are not supported by mainstream agencies because they are designed to attack the website ranking of competitors in popular search engines like Google, Bing, and others. The reason why this tactic has come about is because there are some strict rules followed by search engine algorithms regarding the formation and promotion of a web site. If your site does not follow these rules, it will not be ranked in the search engines.
A person who understands those rules can also use their converse for the purpose of attacking a competitor's site. So the main use for negative SEO is to prevent rival websites from appearing in search engine result page (SERPS) to reduce their ranking on the page.
Good SEO is considered the lifeblood of online business, but negative SEO services can cause severe damage to its reputation, damage that may appear in the form of a sharp drop in the number of visitors and ad revenue.
However, negative SEO attacks are not always gratuitous; sometimes it is just to muffle critical information about a person or business that has been posted on review sites. To overcome this, some companies offer services known as "Online Reputation Management" or "ORM" for short. This method enables companies to hide the negative comments by displacing them with positive information. While working to reduce the position of these sites, the service also promotes more "friendly" sites to improve its reputation online.
While reputation management is also a form of "negative SEO", and aims to eventually improve the credibility of the client's main website, different types of SEO services focus on various methods of SEO to improve the reputation of the site. Removing Ripoff Reports or Pissed Consumer reviews is impossible without taking a negative SEO or ORM approach.
Some agencies that work in this space approach the task by monitoring a client's higher-ranking competitors, and imitate their comp's link profiles and other online activities. Others go for blackhat SEO practices and try to build reputation via clusters of blogs under their control. Other agencies try to insulate bad news by creating a lot of articles or reviews to push down the negative review in the search engine rankings.
Why use negative SEO attacks?
There are basically two reasons for the use of SEO: downgrade rival sites and bury bad news for the company itself. There is no guarantee of the success of this method, but there are many cases where it may prove crucial to improving one's rankings and reputation, and has helped many companies save face online.
