Comment by arek2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arek2 | Hacker News Reader

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I have a website 5000best.com/tools with a ranking of web tools, and I received so far about 40-50 link removal requests. I rejected them all. First I answered to those people, later I stopped answering, because that's waste of my time.

The reason of all that nonsense seems to be this article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notif... and notifications in Google Webmaster Tools that tell people that spammy links point to their website, but do not tell them specifically which links Google does not like. I understand that Google uses link data mainly to estimate popularity of a website.

I don't understand why so large company, a global monopoly with so large revenue, and so much data gathered, can't figure out which sites are more popular than others without wasting webmasters' time. What's so difficult about that task? Why shift any work burden on website owners?

If this task is too difficult, maybe it's time to support the competition, or create a serious competition. Maybe Google does not deserve to be the largest search engine and get all the profits.

It's actually much worse than that. Plenty of the links that those removal requests are all about were placed by spamming comments, creating millions of bogus accounts across as many services in order to boost PR. That was done automatically.

So now, after the penalty hammer comes down the automatically placed junk supposedly has to be manually removed by the website where the spam was posted, usually accompanied by some vaguely threatening words to the effect of 'if you don't comply we'll use the disavow tool'.

I wish them good luck and refuse to honour any of these requests, they can disavow until they're blue in the face.

See, sending out those vaguely threatening emails is still almost at 0 penalty (it is an automated action) but using the google disavow tool requires a human.

Preferably google should add some really nasty captcha or hard to solve puzzle there for every link disavowed.

Why did Google ask all those SEO companies to send e-mails to me? Why did Google give them a possibility to blackmail webmasters (disavow tool)? The Internet was not supposed to work this way. I should be able to link to whatever I want, and care only about the users, and not care about how competent or incompetent the search engine creators are, together with the SEO industry.

Why dont you just "nofollow" the links? Everyone should be happy

Wouldn't that break the whole point of links and page rank? I link to things I genuinely like or find useful. The only things I nofollow are things I bitch about, because I am petty and don't want to give them any google juice. Other than that, a link is an endorsement, and if Google doesn't like me "liking too many things", that's Google's problem for not understanding websites that are the work of love.

I "nofollow" the links. Also that is additional work and unnecessary burden for webmasters.

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