I am not complaining I know updates will happen and we need to be ready for it. But we always thought Google can never hurt a site based on it’s backlinks but Google proved us wrong. They did not care whether a backlink is built by the site owner or SEO company or by some spammer. They just went ahead and pressed the killer button. I am sorry to say Google your update is one of the biggest mistake you ever made. It is not because you killed many SEO Businesses it is because you allowed a site to be hurt by it’s backlinks. Now you need to face the wrath of many disgruntled webmasters. Now sites are attacking other sites with 1000s of negative links, I have to agree we tried that too and have success to some extent. So Google wake up and don’t allow webmasters to kill other good ranking sites. We don’t have time to check our links weekly to see if anyone is sending negative backlinks to us.
I recently saw a webmaster hangout video where John muller ( now the unofficial representative for Google webmaster team because Matt Cutts is on leave ) claims people are complaining about negative SEO for a long time. He even says it has been a claim since 2002. That is not true. Before penguin update there were claims of negative SEO, I agree but the whole game changed when you released penguin update. Before webmasters complained on something that they have control over. For example webmaster claimed a SEO company created cloaking pages on their site or a competitor hacked into their site and created cloaking pages. But how do you justify a backlink. No one can control a backlink to a site. You allowed site to be affected by a backlink. So this gave real chance for negative SEO attack. Before penguin update this was not possible but now it is possible. So negative SEO was always there but it became practically aggressive and possible only after penguin update. If you think it is not true then you are hiding your head like a ostrich and think nothing happens around you.