How Google plans to Control Negative SEO
 

http://seo-hacker.com/google-plans-c...-negative-seo/

worth a read

Disavow tool is not working in it's current state.

But then can't you set up crappy links to get traffic, and then disavow them?

Interesting article :thumbsup

Negative SEO is really only possible on sites with a weak link profile that aren't yet trusted. If your site is established, has some strong links, some branding signals and decent rankings than shitty links will simply be devalued to point of being worthless rather than being detrimental. If your site is weak than sure a negative SEO attempt could hurt you, but why would someone want to waste their time trying to hurt a site that doesn't rank well in the first place.

The only two exceptions are links from penguin penalized pages (but to do this you would have to dig up enough pages you know to be penalized and manage to get links from enough of them to hurt a competitor) and brute force attempts like mass DMCA's, DDOS and then report the 404 to Google and malware injections.. of course if you've been targeted for this kind of shit you've got bigger worries :)

Disavow has its use but I personally wouldn't spend too much time worrying about negative SEO. At the end of the day, if you keep adding good links they'll offset the bad ones.

Wow, you are so far behind the curve. That tool is 1 year old already.

true, very old news.

The correct way to do it would be to add the rel="nofollow" tag. If you're putting up links to get traffic, thats legitimate advertising, but it shouldn't pass link juice (that can get you spanked by google).

Traffic. thats the name of the game with Google.

If you wish to harm you competitions just buy link to their site in threads like "300+ hardlinks for 5$"

That is side dark of google algo

I agree. All sites have links. Some you sought after, some you didn't. Some are good, some are bad. At the end of the day. as long as the good outweigh the bad, negative SEO shouldn't be an issue.