Bing's spam fighter, Frédéric Dubut, said on Twitter "I haven't seen any case where a change in rankings would be provably attributable to negative SEO only." We know Google has mostly said that negative SEO doesn't really work with Google, although they have been a bit wishy-washy on that. Here is Bing kind of saying the same thing.
Frédéric Dubut first said "We are definitely keeping an eye for potential negative SEO attacks. I'll say that all things considered, these are still quite rare in comparison to "traditional" spam." So I decided to ask him to clarify:
you've seen examples of where this has worked?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 1, 2019
He followed up saying "Let's just say I've seen it way more often than not used as a justification in reconsideration requests." But that wasn't good enough for me.
yea, but that doesn’t answer the question. You can say it is incredibly rate, but you have seen it work?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 1, 2019
So then he said these three following statements:
I haven't seen any case where a change in rankings would be provably attributable to negative SEO only.
— Frédéric Dubut (@CoperniX) August 1, 2019
Adding later:
Can an attack push a site that's very close to the decision boundary to the other side? In theory it's possible. Can it be attributed to the attack itself or the many other factors that had the site originally close to the decision boundary? Hard to say.
— Frédéric Dubut (@CoperniX) August 1, 2019
So - do you think Bing can be impacted by negative SEO?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update:
I'll add that I approach this with an open mind. Some people replied on Twitter that negative SEO works better than we think. If you believe so, please send me examples and convince me with actual data. This is always helpful for us to prioritize our spam fighting efforts. https://t.co/OZ8YlqRlcz
— Frédéric Dubut (@CoperniX) August 2, 2019