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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

The 'disavow' mentioned in the article is the official method to communicate with google about bad spammy links.

Further, say you're google - how do you tell that these spammy links are from an external extortion threat to a company and not an attempt at black hat, spammy SEO?

It's realistically a minimum of a couple months for Google to remove disavowed links - if ever.

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Wouldn't it make more sense to make suspected "black hat" SEO not contribute to a websites rankings but also not hurt it?

It's always been an issue that someone can purchase links on spam websites and harm competitors, I would imagine that Google knows about this.

I don't see any advantage to harming a websites rankings because of these questionable SEO techniques.

The problem with that is that you can then post a houndred times as many links and hope that just a few of them go through.

It is a cat and mouse game and we are going to get fucked.

As mentioned by someone else in this thread, that opens up for spammers to turn it up a notch and spam even more. "hey it can't hurt and some may slip through & increase the pagerank"

This is why standardized tests like the SAT deduct a quarter point for wrong answers. There needs to be a "penalty" to keep the expected value even.

But in this case, another student is taking your SAT exam after you've handed it in and filling in blank answers with wrong answers.

No question that somebody is cheating or that the teacher should do something. Just saying, the algorithm is punitive for a reason.

Further, that student has no ID and misspelled your name, but some how you still don't get to go to college.

Google just keeps creeping deeper into the shade ...

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