Negative SEO is terribly simple.

* In my tests, something as simple as doing a 301 redirect from a banned site in a similar or identical niche was enough to have a relatively dramatic impact on rankings. If the pages were 301ed individually to a similar page on the competitors site? Even more dramatic.
* Link spamming even works. Whereas sites that have messageboard profiles that end up ranking top 10 for “buy viagra” are rarely penalized, it’s not too hard to find the difference between that and intentional link spam. I won’t get into the details on that though.
* Duplicate content is the hardest to defend against. While Google’s dupe content filters are generally a joke, this is not so with full content scrapes. Especially in situations where there is an RSS feed. A quick copy and more rapid promotion via any number of methods gathers more link juice to the duplicate article, and it can lead to the original being flagged as duplicate content.
* Another duplicate content trick is for people that have catch-all subdomains leading to the same content. Hyping those up causes the domain to duplicate itself if the webmaster hasn’t specified a preferred domain/prefix.

Why is Negative SEO Becoming More Common? : Slightly Shady SEO.

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