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Comment by underdown | Hacker News Reader

it would be nice if google gave us a decent tool to check domains before we bought them. Currently they hide most (>90%) of back links.

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That would be an incredible gift to spammers. Just keep spamming until you see your domain health go from green to yellow. Then you can calibrate just how much you can get away with.

It's a nice idea, but will just make the spam problem worse.

it's usually pretty obvious to spammers when they get penalized. their traffic drops and if they use webmaster tools (admittedly ill-advised and unlikely) they get an explicit message telling them they've been caught.

Yeah, perhaps something like a domain report card highlighting any problems their system has currently flagged for it and linking to solutions. Would be useful even on domains you've owned for a long time, just to help determine if there are any concerns.

For example, when Google first started the Panda updates, I read that some sites were being targetted via paid link buys NOT purchased by the actual owner. Would be nice if there was a tool that let the owner find out that was what was happening to his site.

The Penguin update targeted spam links not Panda (the Panda update penalized thin/spun/lame content). It is confusing...they clearly don't support color diversity :).... In webmaster tools you can report incoming links that are spam. Google has along way to go. Doing a backlink analysis before a domain purchase is time consuming and most people don't know how to do it.

Haha, thanks for the heads up. I knew it was one of the P animals :)

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