Yesterday, Search Engine Watch published a story that was a bit outdated. What they eventually did was redirect the story to an older story which said the same thing.

In short, Google updated the time stamp on their Can competitors harm ranking? help document. It was assumed by the author of the story that the content changed as well, but it did not. The content did change over a year ago and we reported that but the truth is, on the negative SEO claims by Google, Google’s Matt Cutts always said it was possible.

I mean, back in 2007 we reported Matt Cutts as saying that it is possible, but very hard. Now it is easier but still very rare, according to Matt Cutts.

In the Hacker News thread, where this SEW story was brought up, Cutts went in to the thread to defend Google again.

He wrote:

Matt then says later on that virtually all the cases of negative SEO he has personally looked into, the vast majority “didn’t hold up.” Matt wrote:

A poll we ran in 2010 had most SEOs believing negative SEO existed.

Should we worry and take Matt’s advice on this and not worry too much?

Forum discussion at Hacker News.