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What about something like a disavow.txt file that site owners could use to list domains or URLs with unwanted inbound links. It would be similar to the Google D
by csears 13y ago
What about something like a disavow.txt file that site owners could use to list domains or URLs with unwanted inbound links. It would be similar to the Google Disavow Links tool, but more open and standardized.
We could write a simple spec around it. I'd see it being similar to robots.txt in form and function... easy for a human to write, easy for a search engine to parse, easy to generate programmatically if you need to scale it up.
Also, it avoids the black-hat SEO problem since only folks with access to the site could control the content of the disavow.txt file.
Thoughts?
- jacquesm 13y agoGoogle webmaster tools already verify if the owner is for real. The disavow tool is 'safe' in this sense, and requests to remove links sent via email are definitely not safe in this sense (that's why I never comply with those, for all I know I'm aiding some black hat by killing backlinks of a legitimate site).
- csears 13y agoTrue, but that still leaves other search engines in the dark about which links should be ignored. I thought disavow.txt might be a better solution to help us avoid The Destruction of the Web.
- jacquesm 13y agoGood point, of course there are other search engines too and in a way a 'webmaster / search engine' interface that requires webmasters to have direct contact with a search engine when the same thing could be fixed by something the crawler could pick up is less elegant. I had not thought this through when I wrote my reply to you, you are absolutely right.