Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a malicious attempt to harm a competitor's rankings, often by pointing spammy backlinks at their site.
Negative SEO refers to adversarial tactics aimed at damaging someone else's search performance. The best-known form is link-based: an attacker blasts thousands of toxic backlink links, often with spammy or pornographic exact match anchor text, at a target site hoping to trigger an algorithmic demotion or a manual action. Other variants include content scraping, fake reviews, and creating malicious redirects.
It matters less than its reputation suggests. Google has stated for years that its systems are designed to ignore the kind of low-quality links used in these attacks, precisely because anyone could otherwise sabotage a competitor. In practice, a well-established site with a strong organic profile is very hard to harm with link spam alone.
The honest caveat: real, effective negative SEO is rare, but unusual spikes in spammy inbound links do warrant monitoring. If you see a sudden, deliberate flood of bad links in your backlink reports, document it and consider a disavow file as a precaution. Do not panic-disavow normal low-quality links, and remember that most reported "negative SEO" turns out to be ordinary noise that Google already discounts.