Hacker News Reader

This happened with normal search, Google punished companies for spam links to their websites which caused sites to pay for bad links to their competition to raise their relative ranking.. It's now necessary for everyone to review links to their site and disown them.

View on HN

I created a small one-off blog a while ago for a single hiking trip I made, and as you might imagine, I link to several product sites for the equipment I use - plain ol' links, not affiliated or anything.

I got an email out of the blue one day from a product company asking me to remove a link. I did so, but I never really understood why a company would reduce business opportunity (however minute) by asking me to do this.

I’m not into SEO but I wonder if this type of thing can make a blog look like a sock puppet blog of sorts and thus impact google ranking??!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com