A negative SEO question came up in the last Google SEO office hours on the topic of sending "bad actor" fake traffic to a site, to make the destination site look more questionable in Google's eyes. Martin Splitt from Google said that sending such traffic to a site would not negatively impact the destination site.
Martin Splitt said, "just by sending traffic from questionable sources to a site, that site won't be tainted."
This question came up at the 18:48 mark in the video. The question was, "Do I have to be concerned about bad actors trying to make our site appear untrustworthy by sending spam or traffic to my site, since site trustworthiness is binary."
Martin said, that firstly, "it's not really binary." That trustworthiness in Google Search is not binary. I think the confusion there is about trusting a sitemap file's lastmod date, that specifically is a yes or no - but not trusting a site in general.
Then Martin said, "and just by sending traffic from questionable sources to a site, that site won't be tainted."
What can hurt is "if a site does you know spam content or has malware on it these kind of things that's a problem, yes," Martin said.
"But nobody gets to choose or control where traffic or links are coming from so, that's not something that Google search will look at to judge a website's trustworthiness," he ended with.
Here is that video:
Forum discussion at YouTube.
