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We've covered negative SEO a lot here, the practice of harming your competitors in the search results so that you can go up in the rankings because they go down in the rankings.
A WebmasterWorld has an SEO who tried an experiment, emailing 84 site owners across dozens of verticals, to see if they were interested in hiring his company to perform negative SEO. The results were pretty shocking.
61 of the people responded to his offer, with 13rejecting the offer, 19 asking for more information and 29 asking to go ahead with the offer. So that is 79%, almost 80% asking to go ahead or learn more about the service.
It is sad to see that people would want to harm their competitors to get ahead but this is the new world of Google's search results.
To learn more about this very small and limited study, see his blog post.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
