I think we are starting to see the end of negative seo now. Google have recently released the disavow tool which allows users to log into their webmaster tools account and tell google what backlinks to ignore.
Also common advice is that negative advice (unless done by serious black hat site hacking) doesn't have any affect, in fact google will just ignore the links built by competitors and the links they built back to hurt you probably won't count for anything.
Google is doing more and more to get rid of black hat behavior, this is why we're starting to see author rank and social ranking signals play a bigger part, as they're harder for SEO's to game........ for the time being at least
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