Can we ask Google to ignore links? Pretty soon we can

[morestar]

So it looks like Google is going to give webmasters a chance to negate links within Webmaster Tools, sooner or later. I'm assuming it's through Webmaster Tools that we'll be able to do the negating.

Great news? I think so. I'm not really one to worry about 'negative' links but I'm sure if I sift through the list of links for some of my websites I'm sure I'd like to get them ignored by Google.

So now what's going to happen? If a website is reported as a "bad link" from any one webmaster, what's the effect upon that website? In a way that's reporting a website as spam. Will Google discredit their rankings in the search results? Maybe if too many websites 'report' too many 'bad links' from certain websites, they'll start seeing the negative SEO effects on their websites too!

I'm thinking to some degree this is going to cause a stirring in the SEO world too - if I link to you and you don't "like" my site, what am I in for? This we need to know...

[oriontis]

I just deleted all outbound link from my webpage last night. I had so many link spammers that replied to articles on my website. I had to delete at least 800 posts but I think its probably worth it. To have 800 outbound links to spammy sites on one's pages cannot be a good thing.

[antihero13]

I have mixed feelings on this. Would the webmaster of the site linking to you be alerted if you negated his/her link? Would there be any other way that webmaster could find out? Will Google even record the links you're negating for its records? This could lead to bad blood and webmasters might negate your links into their website for retaliation. Also, you may find yourself negating a link that's coming from the website or social media page of one of your customers or clients. If they found out you negated one of their links to you they might not take kindly to it.

There's good in the idea though. You can't control everyone who decides to link to your page, their websites, the content on their websites or how they do their website's SEO. However, under this plan if someone's link to you is hurting your rankings, you can negate that site and you won't feel any damage. Then again, if there really is no such thing as negative SEO then there really is no point for this tool since those links could never hurt you anyway.

Is this like reporting a website as spam? I don't think so. Only the site's content and structure (or maybe lack thereof) could tell you if it's spam. Besides, if a website were spammy Google would already know it anyway and the site would already be very low in the rankings. At worst, the algorithms would do a review of that website first to determine if it's spammy. Also, it's worth repeating that we don't even know if Google is even going to keep track of the links that people are negating.

[ozsubasi]

I don't think it would be a worry for most people that the webmaster of the site linking to them found out, because these would surely be links that without this facility they would have tried to remove themselves, and the webmaster would have known anyway (although one of the major problems in this situation is in getting someone at the site concerned to respond). I can't see anyway that Google would not record negated links, presuming that it would be done through GWT. It couldn't be done anonymously for obvious reasons.
At first glance it would seem to me to be of benefit if they did, because if numbers of requests were made for the negation of links from one site it would surely indicate some kind of a problem could exist and they can investigate.
If I wanted to have a link from another site to mine discounted, I can't think of a situation where I would at present have a link to theirs, so I don't see the possible retaliation problem.
Given that the link wouldn't actually be removed just turned off, I would hope there would be the option to turn it back on again in case of error.

[morestar]

Given that the link wouldn't actually be removed just turned off, I would hope there would be the option to turn it back on again in case of error.

Good observation. The webmaster that produced the now negated link, wouldn't even know about it. The only people that may have some knowledge of their links becoming negated are the ones who link out to websites for negative SEO purposes - just because they're probably monitoring the effects of their works.

[BrandonHeate]

Great questions Morestar, it will be very interesting to see how this is actually implemented. I would be inclined to believe that there won't be too much much negative attention brought to a site that has links being negated from it for the following reasons.

To my best understanding this is a tool to be used against negative SEO attacks and/or older links that used to be good but have gone bad since Penguin. My thinking is that any site/service that is being used a negative SEO attack platform isn't too concerned what white hat SEOs or google for that matter thinks of it. They surely couldn't care less if their links are being zeroed out, because they have already been paid for them. On the other hand, a site whose was so damaged by Penguin that it's links are now toxic to any site it touches, probably does not want to be passing negative link juice unintentionally anyways. Their primary concern is most likely working on getting right with Penguin internally and not their outbound link profile.

That being said, if this new tool does turn into a google sponsored snitching platform or 'bad' site database, it could be very bad. I don't see it going that way though, or at least I'm very much hoping it doesn't

[PhilipDunn]

I am also wondering how this will play out. Will the Page Rank of a site go down if it is negated by Google? How can you know if the site has been deemed a bad site?

[Rocketman1]

Good article from Eric Ward on link removal - http://searchengineland.com/the-unin...removal-122666

[morestar]

Good article from Eric Ward on link removal - http://searchengineland.com/the-unin...removal-122666

This particular idea from the article you posted is scary:

Your competitor has 25 tough-to-get legitimate curated .edu inbounds from academic librarians? No worries. Just send an email pretending to be your competitor, and ask them all to pull the links down. For good measure, offer them a couple hundreds bucks for their time. Even if it only works a few times, hey, it’s easier than actually creating content and earning your own links.

It's looking like the Google link game can turn out to be a farce - you can buy links and be at the top (possible garbage result) or you can go as far as paying people to remove your competitors links - thus pushing yourself to the top (more garbage results).

[SENtelligence]

If I were Google, I would give webmasters an opportunity to disavow only flagged links, not whichever links they like.

I also suspect that Google is not going to ask you, "OK, do you vouch for links A, B and C?"
What it's going to do, I think, is to send you a notification saying "There are unnatural links pointing to your site, blah-blah-blah. If you wish, mark the ones you'd like us to ignore" and let webmasters do all the guesswork. Which kind of sucks, but is better than getting penalized for the links I didn't even build.

And, in case the webmaster also marks the links that haven't been flagged by Google (because he doesn't know which ones have actually been flagged), these markings would simply be ignored as a supposed attempt to abuse the feature.