A case of negative SEO?

[edu-SEO]

We came across today some very strange forum postings. Essentially they look like some nonsense text followed by a list of "adult" terms. In the middle of the list, completely randomly and strangely our brand terms appear in the list. There are no links to anything. The only thing I can think of is that someone is trying to make our brand terms algorithmically associated with questionable "red flag" terms in the eyes of search engines. I have no idea why else this would be happening. Could this be a case of some kind of Fiverr negative SEO attack? Is there any risk? Doesn't seem like anything we can do about it...

[PaddyDisplays]

Forums that have this kind of spam, either don't have it very long (forum mods remove it), or the forum has been abandoned and so is full of spam, so therefore google knows not to take anything seriously from the forum.

It would be a bigger problem if this type of spam was on a page with some authority, (but they why waste a good backlink to your own site, to instead spam 1 of your competitors)

As long as you have some decent authority, I don't think these methods will ever do any real damage, (and if they do it will be short lived)

That's my 2 cents anyway

[Sarbs]

agree with wesley, if there is no associated links your probably ok, although from a brand image point of view you may wish to contact the webmaster and request the post is removed. You can normally find contact detail for genuine sites with WhoIs.

Within the SEO community there is a continuing debate as to whether negative SEO actually exisits. With this one mention your almost certainly fine, but i personally am of the opinion this very much a reality of the SEO world having experienced this first hand on multiple occasions now. But in these cases we are talking about many thousands of links built in just a few days, so again i return to my point that if this is isolated you are fine, and even then the inpact of any negaitive SEO attack will be dependant on the size of your link profile,

If you were interested to know a little more on the debate however a few useful articles to start on can be found here (From Search engine round table) and here (A whiteboard friday by Rand). Another good example to look up is when Rand issued a challange to damage his blog from negative SEO,

Anyway, off topic a little, sure you should be fine.

[WesleySmits]

As long as there are no links to your website this should not be a problem for you. If there are links pointing to your site in these kinds of context then you should disavow the links through Google Webmaster Tools.