Matt, what's to stop people creating a website (or multiple websites) filled with spammy links pointing to their competitors websites, thereby reducing the weighting of a competitor in Google's pagerank algorithm. Is there protection against that sort of activity?
I think this is pretty common, if you want a website to rank. Then rank it as best as you can then smash the other websites with shitty, unnatural links. Pretty good idea actually but if it continues then it creates a really bad environment for search engines.
Not just a good idea this is actually done already by the blackhat guys, they also use the same technique to extort you in the classic "nice website rankings you have here, be a shame if anything happened to them" manner.
The disavowal tool really isn't that hard to use. Yes, it is more work than no work, but if you depend on a search engine for traffic, you're going to have to do some work to optimize for it (like, sign up for webmaster tools).
There is no protection against this from a publisher perspective.
The vast majority of link removal requests I've received do not come from an email address that matches the destination of the link for which the removal is requested.
Not the case. I do speak to a lot of the smaller merchants who email as I feel for them.
They still don't really understand the web, and they hired someone who appeared professional to them (and probably cold called them). Only after a while do they realise they're paying a lot of money for something unquantifiable and with no guarantee of hitting the front-page of Google, and so they end that relationship (in fear, as they're told that whatever placement they now have may be in jeopardy).
So starts the merry-go-round, where the smaller merchants constantly jump from one bad SEO company to another. Each one creating mess, whilst claiming they'll clean up the mess before.
I do feel for the smaller merchants. Their business is being eaten by the internet, and they're missing out and have ambition but are being fleeced by sharks every step of the way.
Can you give any specifics? Unless I'm too stupid to figure it out, mathematically, the only possible way to do that is simply ignoring (potentially) spammy links, instead of considering them negatively. I mean, SEO linkfarm --> publisher site looks the same as Competitor's linkfarm --> publisher site.
For most of your comments are getting greyed out, I might think that there is some other people that'd back my words.
You're Google employee, right? You lot have gone quite cheeky nowadays. You're exploiting the monopoly you hold in the search market, to make people adhere to your standards, instead of adhering the standards the internet community naturally generates. I'd suggest Google engineers to go develop better algorithms instead of telling the internet off.
