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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

Somehow it seems unfair for Google to suggest that people spend time with the disavowal tool to correct deficiencies in Google's algorithms.

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Especially when a competitor could buy 1000s of these links for $20 on a place like fiverr. Are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives disavowing this stuff?

Edit: the 1000s figure is not an exaggeration. Go to fiverr and search on "back link" to see.

Really?, wow... I had no idea about that. I bought some followers for a client once, but "1000's of links" for $20 sounds surreal (at least for me!)

You would be really shocked at what $20 can get you in some communities. You might have inspired me to do some writing on the subject.

it's mostly automated comment spam, forum spam and the like.

75% of those links won't even be valid, so you really do get what you pay for on Fiverrrrrrrrr.

Google gives instruction on how to do it in bulk [0]. You can:

- Download your links from webmaster tools.

- Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links.

- Use the disavow tool [1] to upload the file. (If your livelihood depends a lot on organic traffic, that is one scary red button. The wording on the page coupled with the button text makes it sound like you will disavow all the links to your website.)

[0] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

[1] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...

Not really a "bulk" solution at all...

"- Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links."

That's the part where intensive manual labor comes in, weeding through those links one by one.

Oh, I know. I guess we're supposed to be thankful for being able to submit a single file, though.

I also noticed that the help page states "(the file type must be .txt and it must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII)". How many non-technical people even know what that means?

How many websites that are concerned with SEO cannot find somebody who can know what that means for them?

And what are the chances that if somebody doesn't know what that means they will mess it up? It is not like UTF-8/ASCII is something that you have to go out of your way to choose.. it is going to be what is defaulted to.

What if you've never heard of SEO but are being attacked by competitors planting spam links, taking advantage of Google's broken algorithms?

Whether or not they have heard the term before, I think that people who care about their website's google results and don't know how they could possibly find someone to help them make a text file are a minority not really worth worrying about.

Even more so if those links have previously been placed by people in their pay!

So:

company pays crap SEO to place spam links all over the globe to increase google rank

google increases page rank

crap SEO works a bit more together with 1000's of fellow crap SEOs

google increases page rank

google notices problem, starts penalizing sites with crap ranks

companies that previously employed crap SEO to spam now pay crap SEO to blackmail site owners previously used to place spam links on to remove links 'or else'.

Really, this is not a good development. The burden of dealing with spam is bad enough, now we need to deal with being blackmailed by SEO spammers to clean up after them as well or risk being penalized in google? wtf?

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