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 …