We've covered the topic of negative SEO to exhaustion but hey, Google's John Mueller had a nice line about it this morning.
Someone asked him what they should do now that their competitor started a negative SEO attack against them. John basically said, that is good - while they are busy doing that, you can focus on moving forward with your web site. He is saying that they are losing and wasting time doing negative SEO and while they do that, you can work on making your site better so you are steps and steps ahead of them.
Here are the tweets:
@perth_my keeps them busy while you can continue moving forward :)
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) January 16, 2017
I know a lot of SEOs don't fully believe this but this is an optimistic way to look at this.
Forum discussion at Twitter.