I think there's a very good argument to be made that negative SEO should be illegal, with punishment/compensation similar to that of slander and libel in the United States. (Which are incredibly specific, due to free speech issues.)
Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim, or publish anything they want whatsoever?
If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious.
Likewise, if negative SEO were illegal, it might have the same benefits.
Of course technically the standard would be much different from slander/libel, but the fundamental reason that we would limit free speech in this way is clear. It is just more damaging to the person being damaged than the limit on the free speech that it imposes costs us. (Which is taken seriously in the United States).
So, for this reason, there is a good argument to be made for specific, nuanced, laws against negative SEO in the form of civil penalties. I would support such a law.
It might help in some cases, but people doing this probably aren't that stupid and would use foreign entity to do the dirty work if there was such law in effect.
This takes us down a very slippery slope. Linking, is not illegal and I think we can all agree that the web would be ruined if simply adding a link to a site you own or control were made illegal.
So that raises the question: How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? Pretty soon you'd have people arrested for linking to somebody's site from a news article or to/from sites like ripoffreport.
What happens if I write an article about how shit McDonalds is, like really bad and post information about the mistreatment of animals, or the horrible practices that they follow and in this article I link to them. I mean I'm writing this article so that people stay away from McDonalds because I feel its damaging to their health. Would a link to there website on that article be illegal?
Yes. It's certainly a slippery slope but we can navigate it intelligently (as we do with defamation) and it's worth it to keep people from building link farms pointing to a competitor so that Google will punish them.
The solution isn't to make linking illegal - it's for Google to stop the penalizing and just simply not count the links they don't like. Penalize for on-site stuff, just ignore the off site stuff.
I realize they want to take away the incentive for spammers, but let's shift the burden of finding a better way to do that onto them instead of changing the laws about how the web works.
They will just =not count= more stuff - same as negative counting.
Overall the entire ranking business depending on external links instead of the actual content will always be exploitable to some degree.
it's a fairly ridiculous idea that slander and libel are "illegal". Yet when you explore it more deeply, you find some of the laws actually make sense.
Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim, or publish anything they want whatsoever?
If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious.
Likewise, if negative SEO were illegal, it might have the same benefits.
Of course technically the standard would be much different from slander/libel, but the fundamental reason that we would limit free speech in this way is clear. It is just more damaging to the person being damaged than the limit on the free speech that it imposes costs us. (Which is taken seriously in the United States).
So, for this reason, there is a good argument to be made for specific, nuanced, laws against negative SEO in the form of civil penalties. I would support such a law.