What is Negative SEO?

An attack strategy where a competitor purchases large volumes of low quality backlinks and points them at a rival domain to trigger a search engine penalty against that site.

From Disavowing Harmful Website Links: How to Identify Them Ep. 603

A competitive attack in which bad links or mixed signals are sent to search engines to harm a competitor's rankings rather than competing through legitimate optimization.

From Overcoming Business Growth Hurdles: Strategic Insights for Startups with Jeff Holman

Harm caused to a site's rankings when it receives low-quality or irrelevant inbound links, such as pet-related links pointing to an engineering website.

From 5 SEO Mistakes That Smart People Make by Jeremy Knauff #408

The practice of implementing black hat SEO techniques on another site, usually by a competitor, to reduce that site's search engine rankings through spammy links, fake reviews, content scraping, or hacking.

From 7 Tips to Protect Your Site From Negative SEO by Aleh Barysevich #378

An attempt by a competitor to harm a site's rankings by pointing low-quality or unrelated links at it. The hosts note Google essentially assigns zero value rather than negative value to such links.

From 2012 SEO Year in Review - Part 1 - #seopodcast 174

The practice of doing harmful things to a competitor's site to reduce their ranking so your own ranking will increase.

From Bad SEO versus Good SEO - #seopodcast 146

The art of devaluing a competitor's site using SEO tactics, such as pointing spammy or dangerous site links at their domain to trigger a penalty.

From Real Estate and Negative SEO, the real scoop - #seopodcast 147