I think the term Negative SEO is a good blanket term for one or more of the following:

Business smear campaign
Criminal defamation
Reputation manipulation
Business traducement
Civil conspiracy

Or some other legal term that would describe or define the effectivity of the malicious activity of negative SEO.

Should I find myself having to enlighten a lawyer on what Negative SEO is I would tell them to imagine a competitor posting information and links all over the internet with link anchors like:

“This Lawyer is a thief”
“Lawyer sells p0rn”
“Lawyer ripped me off”
“Lawyer is actually a drug dealer”

Then advise the lawyer that all business referrals coming the Google almighty would then cease due to the negative SEO campaign against them.

I assume you get the idea..

Business smear campaign
Criminal defamation
Reputation manipulation
Business traducement
Civil conspiracy

And possibly:

• False advertising
  
• Unlawful competition
  
• Libel (in addition to defamation)
  
• Fraud (causing material harm by means of deception)
  
• in the US: Wire fraud (fraud commited via communication technology, a federal offense)
  
• Circumvention of electronic security measures (aka: Hacking)
  
• Unauthorised computer use
  
• Copyright violation
  
• Trademark violation
  

There are probably more. The lawyers can be as creative as the perps...

Most of those will be very hard to bring to court. For a criminal case you typically need to prove both intent and the damages caused by it. Not easy to do when eg. an independent third party (search engine) has been deceived.
That's probably one reason why copyright and trademark cases are seen most often. Make sure you have your stuff registered!

Lawyers can only make a case of reputation damage,if any. i.e.e if someone linked to you with inappropriate keywords that damage your personal or brand's reputation. Any other form of linking will not be good enough for them to make a case.

A service or set of actions that are outside a search engine's guidelines and may negatively affect a site's rankings or their complete removal from the search engine index of the particular site.

There is definitely no legal definition for it. But just read your own above definition again. Does Google have any guidelines for third parties on how to deal with a site. AFAIK most of their guidelines apply only to the owners/webmasters. Next think about what are the ways that a third party who doesn't have any control over a site can impact a site's ranking? Linking or reviews done to create a bad reputation can only be dealt with as a reputation damage case. The other possible ways might be to link to you excessively from unrelated sites and/or with appropriate/inappropriate keywords in a manner that can hut the site's ranking on search engines, but does not damage the "reputation". If this is negative SEO, google definitely provides you a way to come out of this attack by providing you with a way to "Disavow links". Moreover, this is hard to prove as you can never claim that google is ranking you lower because of these reasons. Google is never going to come out in support of your claims for ranking you lower.

So what are the other set of actions which you want to call as "Negative SEO"? Can you give one example of an action that falls outside the ambit of the above? Definitely, parasite SEO as someone described above is hacking and is illegal and it doesn't have anything to do with SEO.

I don't think this is any different than it has always been. I can pay people to go stand outside a business right now with signs saying it sucks. I can call people with influence on a places customers and tell them the place sucks. I could even pay a writer at a magazine to say something bad about a place of business. I can send mail to a bunch of people saying how bad somebody is. There are already legal and illegal ways to do negative things to a business. You could say that negative SEO is easier to not get caught doing but you could do all the things I said above in ways that nobody would know that you did it. Negging a company is nothing new.

Negative SEO is nothing more than what we 1st dealt with on reviews. There was really nothing we could do in the beginning phases of reviews, but now this has changed. False negative reviews be it a blog or online review companies can now get you arse sued, as it should be. This will all come into play with negative SEO, the biggest problem will be proven it was intent to do harm, and with so many farms out there I really see this being a difficult area to pin down the actual client that contracted out the work.

Not that it matters to most blokes hustling SEO work, as most are unlikely to carry insurance appropriate to their business risks, but most insurance policies exclude coverage for intentional wrongdoings, i.e., harm that was intended (versus harm due to negligence).

Jurors may be a bit squishy when it comes to assessing damages for negligence but may feel less constrained when an actor/defendant intended to do harm.

As others have said, there's likely a mixing of legal theories that would attach to, underlie or support a cause of action (lawsuit) for "negative SEO": libel (writings), slander (spoken/video), tortious interference with prospective economic gain, false light, fraud, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Some further research on economic "torts": [en.wikipedia.org ]

Shai, your definition is a good start, although I have problems with the phrase "sabotaging a competitor's website" as that would only be one type of negative SEO attack, and not necessarily the most common.

If I bombard a competitor's site with crappy links, I haven't sabotaged their site. I haven't touched it. Maybe it should say something like:

"The wilful and malicious act of sabotaging a competitor’s website, or acting to manipulate search engine ranking factors in relation to a competitor's website with the express aim of either negatively affecting their rankings or their complete removal from the search engine index for a competitive gain."

A lawyer would word this better, but I hope the idea is there.

elguiri, Thanks for your input with regards to the definition. I think that the word Sabotage does not necessarily infer a physical act. i.e its possible to sabotage someone's good reputation by spreading rumours.

I have to admit that this thread has not gone in the direction I expected. I thought, that unlike the internet lawyers I contacted, we will have a general consensus on what the definition actually is. Boy was I wrong. I'm still amazed that some consider bad reviews or copyright violations as a form of NSEO. Definitely not what I consider it to be. I fully understand that we are not going to reach some sort of legally binding definition here (hence my single quotes around the word Legal in the thread title) and I also did not really want the thread to get into the 'provability' of negative SEO or how difficult it is to actually carry out in real terms. I am particularly interested in pining down the majorities view on what they consider to be Negative SEO.

@Indyank, just because Google provides a way out does not remove any legal bearings from the perpetrator of such an attack if proved. Not everyone is aware of the Disavow tool and not everyone is able to use it effectively. But again, im digressing.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 5:23 pm (utc) on Aug 25, 2015]

I actually don't see how you could ever. come up with a standing legal definition, because it depends too much on what Google does when something happens. And, as we all know, that can change with no notice. Right now, pointing a million pronsite links is a bad thing. But what if later on, it turns into a ranking signal. Yes I know that's ridiculous, but you get my point. SEO stands for search engine optimization and that means whether an action is positive, negative or neutral is pretty much up to the search engines - no?

Not to mention that all legal systems ( and therefore "legal definitions" ) are not the same..
The UK and U.S.A may seem similar from the point of view of a non lawyer in either one of them, but they are very different..
AFAIU the U.S.A's legal system is somewhere between the UK's system and the French system..
You might be able to get some sort of "consensus opinion" about Neg SEO from English speaking webmasters, but a "legal definition" of Neg SEO, that holds in more than one jurisdiction ? ..No way..even the "law makers" in each jurisdiction would disagree..

Of course it may be that such definitions of Neg SEO are in the secret trade talks ( TPP and TISA ) documents that we won't be able to see ( if our respective governments and trade bodies doing the "negotiations" have their way ) until they are signed ..

I'm still amazed that some consider bad reviews or copyright violations as a form of NSEO.

Of course copyright violation and NSEO are not the same thing. But the former may still happen in a context where someone is trying to draw away search traffic from you. And if that's the case, it might actually give you a chance to slap their wrists.

I don't think anyone said copyright violation is negative SEO...what many are trying to say here is it is not and there is nothing that falls within that definition is my humble opinion...

Shai - I think your definition is pretty good - and intent is critically important - it's the intention to damage the target site that makes negative SEO negative - otherwise it's just incompetent SEO.

For that reason, negative SEO would be almost impossible to prove in the case of a "lone wolf" setting out to damage a website: If confronted, they could simply say - yes, I built a million links to this competing page - I was experimenting to see if it would go up or down - if it goes up, I can remove the links and point them at my site, and if it goes down then I won't. (Not caring if you damage someone else's site by accident is not the same as intending to damage it).

In an agency situation of course - there might be some evidence of intent available - email communication with the client, or among staff, or clients buying services described as "bury the competition" could signify intent.

I have a client hit by Negative SEO via a competitor which resulted in a manual penalty by Google. My client even sent google proof that the competitor bought thousands of junk links on Ebay a couple years ago, and this person does it every spring during my client's top season using his top keywords as anchor text. Up to about 200,000 links now. He still ranks #1 for several other terms, just not the main keywords, so business is way down. I hope google is able to do something about this soon.

Reviews on popular internet sites can certainly impact a physical business, either to the positive or the negative.

I regularly eat at a local restaurant that was having some issues with negative internet reviews on review type sites. From a quick look at the situation, it looked like a competitor doing some review sniping.

It's easy enough to bury some negative reviews if it's done properly, so I made some reasonable reviews available which buried the negative, which then allowed totally natural positive reviews. The owner now has really strong positive reviews which are pretty much unimpeachable.

I'd call that blackhat not because it was illegal, but because it wasn't natural. I wasn't paid or compensated, so there is no financial motive. Competitors will probably lose some business due to reduced exposure.

So, is it blackhat, negative seo or just normal business practices with shades of grey?

Negative press goes back though all humankind... but the Net does make it happen "faster". And, though very despicable, it is business as normal: If you can't beat them, take'em out. Those who think that way generally have (or hire) a third party to do the dirty deed... but increasingly, in the days of automation and robust scripting, it could be a single with a vendetta, or a competitor in a tight niche.

Proving it, however, is more difficult these days than in the past. While none of us like it, dealing with negative anything against our enterprise is a necessary evil of doing business.

The search engines, to their discredit, do all they can to avoid or ignore this aspect of human duplicity and rather than deal with it, hand out draconian denies... and the reason why it has worked that way for so long is they are the "only game in town" and can set the rules any way they like as there is always another sucker, er, website to be indexed and added to their listings.

Food for thought: It may not be necessary to "prove" that a fluctuation in ranking is directly attributable to a specific hostile act or series of actions of a competitor or their SEO agency. What may suffice, in a court of law, is a) proof of the actions; b) proof of "the actor"; and, c) proof that such actions are reasonably calculated to impair rankings or that it is generally accepted, in the SEO industry, that such actions risk or are known to injury rankings. The legal proof "cherry on top", which may not be necessary to collect damages, would include direct evidence of an actual intent to harm (email exchanges, comments made and overheard, former employee acting as whistle-blower, etc). I distinguish "direct evidence" of intent to harm ("We're going to screw Company X!") from intention to harm inferred from acts known to harm.

What will make this topic interesting is IF a large agency, on behalf of a large client, goes after another significant ($$$) industry player using such tactics. When there's big $$$ at stake and the players are well funded that's when the lawsuit(s) will be filed that will develop and define the law / legal theories that attach to such actions.

Webwork, Esq. (Not looking for such work at this time. ;))

In terms of explaining it to lawyers (or anyone else not familiar with SEO), I think the essence of it is that negative SEO tries to falsely convince search engines that a site is attempting to manipulate rankings in away that attracts search engine penalties.

Let's all just hope a true legal definition of nseo is never developed, because the lawmakers here, there and everywhere will make the situation worse than anybody in this thread can imagine.

@toidi, I do shudder at the thought of a law banning negative SEO that is as well thought out as, say, the EU cookie law.

It is also possible that it may be possible to sue for negative SEO under existing laws. I have in mind something like this: [ukhumanrightsblog.com...]

Also, negative SEO relies on making a site look like a "bad guy" to search engines. Sounds awfully close to defamation.