Can competitors pay to have spammy sites link to your website?

[mbelsito]

Is there anything stopping competitors from doing a negative text-linking campaign against your site to purposefully harm your business?

[cbielich]

Nope, its one of the meanest things someone can do to you, but it does happen.

[DigitalDiameter]

No. Anyone can build links to any site.

You can always ask webmasters to remove links, but they are much easier to build than have them removed. If the site is stating false negative information about your site, it might be considered libel and you could try to threaten legal action.

[APICDA]

Nothing is stopping someone from doing it........... although paybacks could be rough.

I think 6 drops of Visine in their food would be a good start.

At the least, it would keep them off the computer for a while.

[cbielich]

ditto

[KevinBudzynski]

No one is stopping competitors from doing this and it does occur.

Google is discussing a disavow tool that may help filter these links out:

http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-you-a-with-matt-cutts-at-smx-advanced-123513

[rpedri]

We've heard a lot of nonsense from Google before, stating that this was impossible blah blah, but now they seem to be finally accepting that this does happen.

[ToughTimesLawyer]

First of all, is it a problem for you?  Have you seen random spammy links to your site and a drop in SERP?   If it isn't, don't sweat it.   It would takea lot of time or money for a competitor to create enough bad links to hurt you.  Unless you're in a Hatfields and McCoys situation with a competitor, I think it's unlikely.

If you're really worried about it, do a lot of White Hat link building.  At least then you have something to balance out a competitor's sabotage.