This site is written and maintained by me, Bill Hartzer. One person writes every page on it, which is worth saying plainly on a subject where much of the published advice comes from content operations with no case experience behind it. Where a judgment is made on these pages it is mine, and where the evidence is thin I say so rather than filling the gap.
I have worked in search since 1996, and I have served as an expert witness in matters involving search engine optimization, links, and online reputation. That sentence is the whole basis for the site's claim on your attention, so both halves are worth unpacking. The first half is dated deliberately and is stated in the same terms onmy own consultancy site: I was optimizing for AltaVista, Excite and Yahoo before Google existed, which means I watched the link graph become the thing worth attacking, and watched it stop being that. The second half matters because expert witness work is a different discipline from marketing. In litigation the question is never whether something looks toxic. It is what happened, on what date, what records establish it, and what an opposing expert will say about the method used to establish it. I have testified in United States Federal District Court and in the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands, and I have been deposed in state, federal and international matters. That is why this site cares so much about dated evidence and preserved records.
The first-hand work this site rests on
Some of my experience of negative SEO is first-hand in the least enjoyable sense. In December 2017 my own site was the target: thousands of links from cheap novelty top-level domains, aimed not at the home page but at the commercially valuable ones, including my expert witness services page, which fell from the top three to around position eight. The diagnostic sentence I wrote then still holds up: look for links to a page that should not have links, and links to a page that already has a lot of links. My remediation advice from 2017 has aged less well, and I would rather date it than quietly update it — I disavowed at the domain level then, and after Penguin 4.0 and SpamBrain that is usually the wrong reflex now.
In April 2018 I published a finding that a spam page on a domain I did not control had copied a victim page's entire head section, including its rel=canonical element, so that the spam page declared the victim's URL as canonical. Finding it took an unusual route: the ranking loss was visible in Search Console but the cause was not, a source-code search engine did not surface the relationship, and only a link index storing canonical data alongside link data showed it, because the attacker had linked outward to other domains they controlled.Search Engine Journal covered it on 20 April 2018 and credited the finding to me — and, importantly, noted that the exploit "has been documented but never tested or verified experimentally."
What happened next is the part a boastful page would leave off, and it is the part I want here. Google's John Mueller publicly disputed the finding within days, writing that "the premise that rel canonical combines pages is wrong" and that the tag "is a signal for canonicalization; one URL wins, the others' crawls get dropped."Search Engine Roundtable carried the exchange on 23 April 2018, and its author was skeptical of my framing, noting the tactic was not actually novel. I forwarded details to Google and received no reply, and no source has ever established that anything was fixed. Google did not confirm the mechanism and I am not going to write that it did. What the episode does establish is a method: I publish findings under my own name, in enough detail that a Google spokesperson will argue with them in public, and I link to the argument.
What this site is, and what it is not
It is two things at once, and both halves are real. It is a reference work on negative SEO — every attack vector I could document, each with a verdict on whether it actually works today, how it is recognized and how it is undone. It is also the public face of a practice that sells negative SEO recovery: establishing whether an attack happened, establishing what it touched, and doing the remediation the evidence supports. Disclosing that commercial interest is the only honest way to publish the skeptical pages, and the skeptical pages are the ones that matter. Seven of the 33 vectors here are marked largely neutralized, and those pages say plainly that anyone selling you protection from them is selling you something you do not need.
What it is not is an attack service. It does not perform, sell, broker or teach negative SEO attacks, and no page here changes that. The domain attracts a meaningful number of searches every month from people looking to hire an attacker; the page that meets that demand tells them no and explains, on the facts rather than as a lecture, why buying an attack usually means paying for nothing while acquiring an extortion risk. The attack profiles follow the same rule: enough mechanism to recognize and undo an attack, and no recipe.
A few things I will not claim. I do not guarantee recovery, rankings, traffic or revenue, because nobody honestly can, and a guarantee is the clearest single warning sign in this field. I name no clients and publish no testimonials. I have judged the US Search Awards and the Global Search Awards, which is a different thing from winning them. Every figure on this site comes from a source I fetched, and where an account is self-reported or was never independently tested, the page says so. If something here is wrong, the contact page is the fastest way to tell me.