How do you handle a competitor’s negative SEO attacks?

Negative SEO is rarer than clients fear but it does happen, particularly in litigious or highly competitive categories. The common tactics: spamming the target with low-quality inbound links to trigger algorithmic penalties, posting fake negative reviews at scale, scraping and republishing content to dilute uniqueness signals, fabricating profiles and posting hostile content. The response runs through several established channels. For link spam, Google’s disavow tool tells the engine which inbound links to ignore. For platform-specific attacks (reviews, social, profiles), every major platform has a policy-violation reporting path. For scraped content, DMCA and platform processes apply. For all of it, monitoring through IMPACT and AIQ tracks downstream impact so the program can respond to actual SERP and AI effects rather than reacting to noise. Most negative SEO attempts are noisier than they are effective.