Link building has always been an important part of SEO, but the quality of those links came into focus with the Google Penguin update. Penguin set out to target sites that had “unnatural links” pointing to it and these sites were then penalized. Link building is a time consuming process, but really anyone can do it and anyone can build links to any site that they please. Knowing this, some website owners have thought, “OK, well why don’t I create lots of bad links to my competitors to get them penalized?” This practice has become known as negative SEO. Is it worth looking into? Not in our opinion.