Negative SEO is the practice of sabotaging a competitor’s website by flooding it with low-quality links. The idea is that search engines might interpret these links as spammy behavior and penalize the targeted site by lowering its rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Virtually all websites that rank for relevant search queries attract some low-quality links; this is not unusual and has always been the case. The concept of negative SEO gained more attention after link spam updates made website owners more aware of the quality of their inbound links.
The fear of negative SEO is often exaggerated. It’s important to understand how search engines evaluate links.
Yes, back when internet promotion and SEO were in their early stages, and during the height of the search engine marketing era, thousands of links from unrelated topics could boost a website to the top of Google search results. However, the rules have tightened considerably since then. After numerous algorithm updates and over 20 years of advancements, search engines have become better at matching the topic of a landing page with the sites that link to it. If the topics do not match, the search engine typically ignores those links.
Once again: Links should be relevant and consistent with the theme and content of the linked resource.
Source: searchenginejournal
