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This used to be the "solution" to spammy links: Drop their value to zero. This caused an entire eco-system of spammers with the mentality: "I'll just generate 1
by compbio 12y ago
This used to be the "solution" to spammy links: Drop their value to zero. This caused an entire eco-system of spammers with the mentality: "I'll just generate 1000 links without the prospect of a penalty in the hope that 10 links stick. I then bill my client for a 1000 links, since there is no way to see which links are devalued".
Google's creative solution was to make sure to webmasters that: yes, these links do hurt your rankings. Instead of linkbuilding and diluting the precious link-signal, these spammers now offered link-profile-cleaning services (Mission. F-cking. Accomplished. http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/ ).
- adventured 12y agoYes, and the solution is to penalize the sites guilty of sending out the spam links, not to penalize the receiving sites. To penalize Good Site A, because Bad Sites B/C/D/E are sending spammy links to it, is an inherently morally bankrupt premise.
- csense 12y agoSo wait, if you want to take somebody else's website off Google, all you have to do is make a bunch of spammy links to it? This is insane. Spammers should now be linking to a site and then telling the site owners, "If you want to get your Google rank back, pay us $1000 to take our links down."
- arenaninja 12y agoThis is a thing, in case you're wondering. At my current job, there was a spike a week ago with more than 1k spam links. We've no idea where they're from, or how to disassociate ourselves from it
- adventured 12y agoIt takes some effort, but you can disavow those links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
- adventured 12y agoYou can disavow links via webmaster tools. The onus should not be on the innocent site however, that's bad engineering design by Google.