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What’s up in terms of spamming and hacking at Google’s all-time darling, Wikipedia? Essentially, it’s the old Dmoz story all over again: A long, sordid tale of broken dreams, tainted trust, misguided zeal, faked concerns and, barring politics, some of the sleaziest social engineering extant.

Isn’t it funny how prophecies have a knack of coming true sometimes? One month ago we did a cartoon taking a shot at Google’s hypocritical FUD tactics regarding paid links by fantasizing about what a pair of hardnosed mobsters would do to take advantage of this positively silly state of affairs. Now, it seems that a high profile company like Shopzilla has actually started to pay for link removal!

Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks have become a major concern for successful SEOs as much as for your run-of-the-mill sysadmin because in the age of Negative SEO, with lots of automation tools around to roll out just about every nasty trick in the book, chances that your well ranked sites will become a target some day are pretty high

One of the simplest, fastest and most devastating methods of Black SEO consists of hijacking a competitor’s domain and transferring it to some other registrar. Now, this kind of - criminal - service is being offered on the Web for $200 - or is it?

As these posts illustrate beyon doubt, Googlebowling not only still works, but - more importantly - so does negative SEO. Indeed, your competitors could easily get your sites ranked for totally irrelevant spammy terms, incurring all kinds of “bad neighborhood” penalties.

It’s not every day that we can actually witness more or less in real time the coming-to-being of what may very well turn into a major SEO term in future. TallTroll offers a shrewd analysis and prediction well worth a read.

As news about black SEO and the harm it may inflict on the search marketing industry and the entire commercial Internet begins to hit the mainstream media, it is about time to break down the most common tactics employed and point to solutions protecting you against desperate or hard hitting competitors playing dirty.

After years of the SEO industry’s going in denial mode whenever the topic of negative or inverse SEO was broached, it’s hit the mainstream media now and will expectably evolve into a major buzz now impacting all search marketers and optimizers.