Negative SEO, also referred to as Black Hat SEO, is a practice that involves sending out malicious attacks on high ranking sites with the aim of de-ranking them and ranking your site higher. Black hat SEO floods the search engines with false keywords causing Google and other machines to ignore, lower rankings, or ban another website or page. Sites are using less and less negative SEO to rank higher on search engines. However, owners are now switching to using the same black hat SEO to harm other competing sites by reducing their popularity levels.