Negative SEO - Competitors Can Attack You With Spam Links

[JohnW]

We have all known that crummy links can hurt a site, and many have worried that a competitor could hurt a site with bad links that the site owner knows nothing about until it's too late. There have been many in denial, thinking that Google somehow protects an innocent site from a spam link attack. Here's a March 2012 video from MC where he pretty much says that while this is not easy to do, it can happen.
http://support.google.com/webmasters...n&answer=34449

Are you worried that a competitor could do this to you? Have you ever done this to someone else? Does Google need a WMT feature to disavow bad links?

[AussieWebmaster]

Buying a few links to get Google's attention to cheating sites???

[Dan01]

Does Google need a WMT feature to disavow bad links?

Great idea!

[Dan01]

I think it is a bad idea for SEs to penalize a site for links to it. I have heard some penalties for "unnatural" links. For years webmasters have said that you couldn't get penalized.

[AussieWebmaster]

there have been sites that used links from built content sites that got penalized - We Build Pages had problems years ago but they were really not doing wrong until Google said it was