Negative SEO Does Exist

Yes. It's certainly a slippery slope but we can navigate it intelligently (as we do with defamation) and it's worth it to keep people from building link farms pointing to a competitor so that Google will punish them.

I'd like to look at it in another way. I've a small blog, one that I love running, it makes barely any money, but for a long time ranked for some pretty good keywords.

Anyways, a few of my articles blew up on hackernews, reddit, even on twitter (with smashing magazine tweeting it out), as a result, everyone and their grandma linked back to my articles when they discussed the topic it targeted.

What happened then? I looked at my link profile and I've a few thousand "dangerous looking" backlinks. All from people that had low-ranking blogs or 0 ranking blogs, or that used Tumblr's share feature (which blogged a link and an excerpt) to "bookmark" my site. And some from people that FULLY reblogged my site without permission. Meaning that they took the entire article. They weren't shady either, they had a big banner that said: "I repost articles for my own use to read in case the site goes down" or something to that effect with, obviously, a link back to my site as a source.

What happened? Penguin, Panda, and all the other animals killed most of these sites. Even considered some of them spam.

Now, I have a "dirty" link profile through no fault of my own, using no "shady" tactics.

This just pisses me off to no ends. I never "link built" anything, the links just happened naturally. Yet, I get penalized for it. It's fucking shitty. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I'm really sorry for your parents. That said, I think that being clueless about doing business on the internet and doing business on the internet is a combination that should not come with a guaranteed pay-out. If you then employ someone to act on your behalf (without understanding) then even though your intentions are good you could get hurt.

In that sense I sympathize less with your parents than that I sympathize with the owners of the sites that got bombarded with links to your parents website.

Nobody has an automatic right to turnover based on intentions. The most solid way to grow a business is to find your customers through references and to keep them happy, treat any search engine traffic just like you would treat a walk-in new customer. Pamper them and make them happy, don't count on them coming but when they do make sure they stay.

Your parents actively pumped resources (money) into a fight that they could have chosen to simply not engage in. SEO's are a scummy bunch and I see their pitches on a daily basis so I don't fault your parents for falling for it. Even so, the loss of this traffic and the dent to their reputation is their own fault (doing business in unfamiliar territory comes with harsh penalties) and the fault ofthe SEO's who did it to them (though I clearly think the SEO's are vastly more at fault here).

Recovering from the change is hard for a reason, I fail to understand why your parents website should 'show up in the first few pages of Google', there is no automatic right to that and there are only so many subjects and 'first few pages' to begin with.

Rewriting your product descriptions may or may not be a good idea, I don't particularly care about having duplicate content on my sites because I don't particularly care about google traffic.

I understand that if google traffic is all you have that this could all be very hard to stomach and that it may even mean going out of business altogether. But if all the mom-and-pop stores that give a few $100 to shady SEOs would stop doing business online I know that my workload will go down by several hours per week at a minimum. So from that point of view I would not be too sad.

Still, I believe that your mom and dad may be able to survive this if they learn that relying on a single source of traffic is not a good idea. Much better to really build relationships with other online properties that carry weight with their prospective consumers, or to do it like everybody else is doing it: by spending their money on advertising instead of on trying to game organic search.

If there is a way to be penalized via blackhat SEO there will always be the possibility of negative / competitive SEO.

Ignorance is not a valid defence. Yes, it's harsh, but that's what entrepreneurs sign up for when they start their own business.

Directors of companies are held responsible for the decisions they made. Delegating that decision to others does not abrogate their responsibilities.

If you are in the SEO industry, please stop hiding behind this. The SEO industry have had ample time and patience to clean itself up (naming and shaming these unethical SEO consultant for starters, offering up material small businesses and mom-and-pop operators, checklists in hiring an ethical SEO practitioner, checklists of methods/practices that should be avoided. How to write up clear statements of work).