The Different Types of Negative SEO

Build bad links with the intent of triggering a link manipulation flag/penalty, including “Masquerade Posting” (guest posting, impersonating the target)

Find “Bad Press” against your target and perform link building for it, with the intent of it floating up the SERPS.

Copy the target’s content and publish it across multiple sites/sources. The intent is to impact their rankings and traffic. Google may then also not select the victim’s original version as its primary result.

Link to multiple variant URIs of your target’s high-value pages. Change case, append false parameters/values, etc. This wastes Google’s resources and crawl allocation, among other effects.

Copy content from target, ideally including markup, styling etc. Modify the content to include safe search trigger terms, etc. Republish variants in multiple places and canonicalize back to your target’s original version. G will consolidate the content and attribute it to the original, causing “consequences.”

Assuming for a moment that Google actually pays attention to what “Users” do in the SERPS… How “people²” are avoiding your site and/or abandoning it in favor of another competitor could be used against your target quite easily. Note: This approach would require scale and time.

Abuse comments on your target’s site. This can be used to trigger safe-search, so the target site only shows in SERPS for a much smaller percentage of searches.

Make a page on your site, then use a 302 Redirect, or a Canonical Link to point to a target URI for a period of time, before revoking the 302. Technically, Google will associate rankings with the temporary origin.

Mass requests, heavy requests (big image uploads, hotlinking etc.) The idea is to slow/crash the server.

Google Business Profiles (and some other directories) permit edits and/or “suggestions” to listings. These can seriously disrupt your target’s business activities and income.

Copy the target’s content, then file DMCAs against them. The intent is to get their site out of the SERPS.

Create fake negative reviews to deter your target’s prospects. This will also reduce overall scores/ratings etc.

Create overly positive reviews with the intent of getting the account hit for manipulation.

Jumping in on complaints, negative comments and reviews etc. and stirring the sh*t pot¹, exacerbating the situation, provoking staff etc.

An old type of Negative SEO reputation attack which uses derogatory link-text to get the victim’s site or profile to rank for search terms which negatively affect his/her reputation.

Exploits, brute force attacks, account abuse, social engineering, XSS, basically anything that permits access to your target’s server, database, or rendered content, for misuse.

Create social profiles and/or community accounts, and impersonate the target or their staff. Bad conduct and disgusting responses can lead to a severely damaged reputation. Worse, certain platforms will de-rank businesses for such content.

Contact sites, asking them to remove links to your target. The idea here is to weaken the victim’s authority.

Find “Bad Press” against your target and distribute it, reference it in communities etc. This will increase the quantity of relevant results on sites that tend to rank well.

Obtaining a similar domain name and either siphoning traffic or misrepresenting the target website.

Flag the target’s positive reviews as spam, with the intent of getting them removed and lowering the overall quality score.

Flag an account for review manipulation tactics. This approach works well alongside the “FakeReviews(Good)” approach.

Conceptually, if certain searches and user patterns occur at volume within a window of time, it will likely cause Google to reassess user intent and/or what is being sought, leading the search engine to suggest a competing item and/or website.

Theoretically, you could ping Google a sitemap that was redirected, with HREFLANG data for URIs… and Google would associate the destination with the original URIs, thus abusing their canonical system.
(This was fixed in 2017/2018. So maybe Google finally took some ACTUAL action against NSEO?)

Deliciously Simple: Take a dropped domain that’s been hit by a Google’s Algorithmic markdown, or better still, a manual action – revive it with some trashy AI content, then 301 it to the target.