We have all been awakened to the hype. Negative SEO is real and it seems that the Panda and Penguin updates have potentially made it easier than ever to accomplish. Below, you will read a tale of greed, a tale that is all too possible in todays digital world and a tale that should awaken your focus to your SEO surroundings. It is the tale of a man named Johan Bumbersnickle who felt enough pressure to make the first unethical decision of his professional life, and he was rewarded because of it.

Now the reason that this story is being told is because there is no doubt going to be some of this going on in whichever niche it may be that you reside. Marketers are always feeling the pressure to succeed, and some will make risky decisions in order to achieve their goals. It is my estimation that over the next couple of years we are going to be hearing a few stories of deception involving major brands attempting sneaky methods to bring each other down in the search rankings. Let the tale of Mr. Johan Bumbersnickle be a lesson to us all.

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It was a typical night in Johans small apartment building. The raindrops had become silent due to familiarity of the sound, and the lights flashing ten stories below carried on their role of being his trusty night light. Johan Bumbersnickle always stayed up late, and tonight was no exception. As a digital marketer working for a major software brand, he was constantly driven by his ability to brainstorm and craft creative tactics to gain his employer visibility online. In his budding career he had already increased traffic to the brands primary domain by 70% and managed three annual social media promotions that had increased his brands social reach by over 300%.

He had only been working in digital for three years and already he had been promoted four times and given four pay raises. Slowly he was becoming a thought leader and a recognizable face in the industry he had worked so hard to please. Recently though, he had begun to feel a slight amount of pressure from his boss, who had been expressing concern over the rise of a major competitor in the software space.

Johan had been doing his due diligence. His research revealed a number of red flags that his competition was using black hat tactics to gain search engine rankings, and they were doing a good job of it. There were blog networks that seemed impossible to track, forum signature links in irrelevant spaces, and what seemed to be a well managed campaign producing five star reviews on various software products every three to four days.

It was frustrating to Mr. Bumbersnickle that he had done everything in such an ethical manner and was being threatened by tactics widely regarded to be manipulative and deceitful. It was also frustrating to Mr. Bumbersnickle that he was about to partake in these methods for the first time in his career, with the goal of knocking his competitor backwards and away from the spot that he had worked so hard to make his. The spot was the number one ranking in Google, and the tactic was negative SEO.

In crafting the plan Johan had compared the situation to a riot in the streets. Having a view from above the city he had been imagining what role he would play in a full scale riot and how he could apply that to his first-time negative SEO campaign.

The first thing that came to mind was fear, a fear that would lead him to inform the authorities of what was going on. By comparing these visions to search engine optimization he had created his firs tactic. He was going to troll the Google Webmaster forums and let the world know just what his competition was doing. He was going to contact Google in every way possible and make sure that the powers that be were aware of what was going on.

After a moment of thinking, Johan realized that eventually the riot may become too powerful, and his building would be overtaken by the time the authorities were able to take any action. Now he had to devise ways to survive among the turmoil. In order to survive he decided, he was going to need some resources. In order to get said resources, he was going to have to break in to a place that had resources available. His next tactic had been decided.

Read the rest here:
Crafting An Evil Empire: Looting The Competition with Negative SEO – A Story