It's not justifiable. It's just band-aid for widespread malpractice, but as it is now, this just favors paid links that are hidden better, e.g. inside articles,

It's not justifiable. It's just band-aid for widespread malpractice, but as it is now, this just favors paid links that are hidden better, e.g. inside articles, random texts etc. The whole concept of "link juice" is no longer useful. Google should identify and count real humans visiting web pages via GA and Chrome and rank search results based on actual website usage, and not on how well they can cheat in SEO.