All posts filed under: Negative SEO

Fake reviewer goes down for defamation

In Negative SEO and legal remedies I noted that one form of negative SEO is “where an unscrupulous person posts fake and negative reviews about a competitor’s goods or services with a view to lowering the competitor’s average popularity ranking and therefore reducing its page rank, e.g., in particular commercial services, for popularity-based searches.” When discussing various potential remedies for negative SEO, I noted that one potential remedy for fake reviews is a civil action for defamation. On 6 March 2015, the English High Court delivered its judgment in a case involving a fake review where the action that was successfully pursued against the wrongdoer was indeed defamation:  The Bussey Law Firm PC & Anor v Page [2015] EWHC 563. I thought I’d give a quick rundown on this case given its relevance to the negative SEO post. The claimants were a law firm and a particular lawyer within the firm who practises law in Colorado, United States. As the Court explained, someone posted a defamatory allegation on the lawyer’s Google Maps profile, alongside a …

Negative SEO and legal remedies

The negative SEO campaign against WP Site Care By now, many in the WordPress community will have heard of the negative SEO campaign against WP Site Care that Ryan Sullivan, its founder, described in Negative SEO: Destroying Businesses One Spammy Backlink at a Time. On this occasion, the negative SEO attack appears to have been caused by voluminous backlinks, including a “spike in unnatural links from lots of unsavory sources over the course of a few days” which, in turn, appears to have caused a plummet in Google rankings. Ryan explains that his company’s bottom line suffered a significant hit as a result of the lower traffic volumes to the site and that they were able to trace the backlink attack back to the source: someone within the WordPress community. He says: “They did everything through a third-party, an internet hitman of sorts, to try and cover their tracks, but they weren’t quite careful enough and we were able to uncover where everything started.” Ryan exercised considerable restraint in not naming any names when, it …