Yes, negative SEO exists and it works. And yes, it can do real damage to your site, even going as far as getting penalized.

But wait a minute! I didn't say that to scare you. I have penciled in only the most dramatic scenario so that you are aware of it. Because until the penalty, your competitor has a lot of work to do. And his agenda can be turned upside down, easily.

What are the most common methods of negative SEO optimization?

1. Placing backlinks of questionable quality - creating thousands of low-quality backlinks to a competitor's site is one of the most unsophisticated forms of negative SEO. Multiple signals are sent to the search engines about a questionable neighborhood of your site. Here things are not so simple for the one who wants to do negative SEO. Because, often, even these backlinks can boost SEO. It all depends on the niche, the maturity of the market, and the degree of optimization of your website.
2. Using Over-Optimized Anchor Texts - It is extremely important to optimize your anchor text. But, we have to choose a more natural approach, using keywords, brand names, and links as anchor text. No thousands of links on the same keyword. However, if the use of these texts is done in a less spammy way, your site could benefit.

However, these links and anchor texts could hurt your SEO in a later update from the search engines. So our recommendation is to get rid of them. Next, we will teach you the simple procedure by which you remove them.

How do we fight back when we have thousands of backlinks of questionable quality?

The easiest way to identify a negative SEO attack is to check the backlinks and refer domains that link to our site. If we see many backlinks with high Spam scores, low Domain Authority, and Page Authority, which we know for sure we did not build, it means that our site may be a victim of negative SEO.

What we have to do as a first step is to download all the given backlinks into Excel. Then let's review the spreadsheet in more detail. Here we will be able to see exactly which are those backlinks that led to the massive influx and when they appeared. Did they appear around the same time? All these bad-quality domains should now be put into a simple .txt file. And then this file is sent to Google via the Google Disavow tool:

https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links

How do we fight negative SEO when thousands of over-optimized anchor texts are used?

In the case of thousands of spammy anchor texts, the procedure is very similar to removing questionable backlinks. Because, after all, even in the case of anchor texts, it's all about using bad-quality backlinks. Only the focus was on the keywords associated with these backlinks.

We can export all anchor texts + backlinks linking from them from any (free or paid) backlink analysis tools. We then send the .txt file through the Google Disavow tool.

Don't be afraid of negative SEO, there are enough tools that can easily debate its negative impact. Thus, the competitor who tried to sabotage your work will only be left with many hours invested in unsuccessful attempts to damage your website.