“I don’t want to create a panic”

Exactly.

“but I strongly recommend to check for negative SEO tactics when doing a security review”

Point well taken.

I don’t want to create a panic, but I strongly recommend to check for negative SEO tactics when doing a security review. Most well known potential exploits are easy to fix, for example with proper URL canonicalization or reviews of user generated contents.

Of course most penalized Webmasters did stupid things, but ignoring potential threats is stupid too.

Take the average site that is brought to the Google Webmaster Help Forum, what are the chances that someone may have set out to sabotage one of them? Slim to none with slim being on a crash diet?

The average webmaster is more likely to tank their own site doing stupid things than they are to have to worry about someone else targeting them.

Like other things Google Webmaster Guidelines related, e.g. “hidden text”, people get stuck on a word or short phrase and stop reading after or even before that.

In the case of “hidden text” those two words cause people to ignore another word there, “intent” so that any mention of those two words, “hidden text”, results is many people instantly saying one shouldn’t even in cases such as cascading menus.

In the damaging links case, people seem to be getting stuck on “inbound links” and forgetting to consider who put those links there.

I agree that an expert in negative SEO could take down just about any site they wanted to but at what cost? I have no illusions that ANY of my sites are worth enough to anyone that they would pay the kinds of fees it would take to tank them.

The average site doesn’t have to worry about this simply because their being tanked would not benefit anyone enough to validate the cost.

The only other option is some sort of vendetta but you would have to do some pretty nasty things to my sister before it would be worth my while to pay someone to tank Pamphlets. :-()

Now that we are on the subject, I would guess it would cost maybe $10,000 to $100,000 to get a site tanked, what would be your guess? Maybe talking dollars and sense would put it into a better perspective?

What if a competitor launches a linkspam campaign for my site? Would Google penalize me for his actions?

The answer is perhaps, because IMHO it’s not enough to stay away from questionable shortcuts. Way more important is to make sure that a competitor cannot use exploits to create even the slightest evidence that the site itself is involved. I can think of many ways to make a site look bad in Google’s eyes, an expert in negative SEO can tank most sites out there. Even when the loss of Google traffic is short dated, that’s enough to kill many businesses. It takes time to discover the issues, file a reconsideration request, and get rankings reinstated.

In the past, there was a case of a site that actually was damamged by someone else setting up MANY bad links to the target site but the number of links that it was said to accomplish something like that was orders of magnitude greater than what it took for a site to tank themselves.

So, does that mean that Google was able to tell the difference, 10’s of thousands, or even more, links set up to discredit another site aa compared to only 1,000 links set up by a site to game the engines in their favor?

Personally, it would seem difficult to do the latter but it is the only explanation I can think of to explain why spammers linking to legitimate, but new, sites don’t tank the sites they link to or why we don’t see more cases of little more than 1,000 links tanking a site as badly as the site mentioned in the article.

Maybe the saying, “No competitor can adversely effect a site.” should be modified slightly to say, “Forget about competitors, just don’t do anything totally stupid while holding that shotgun with the barrel opening pointed towards yourself.”

In all fairness, the activity earning the mentioned site the ire of Google supposedly was carried out by an SEO of somewhat ill repute, it would seem, but that doesn’t really change anything, someone of the site or working for the site caused what happened, not a competitor.

Craig