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Why Penalize For Spammy Backlinks Instead of Just Ignore

by consultant1027
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
When Google started penalizing for spammy backlinking strategies way back it create a new SEO niche, Negative SEO.

I was just thinking the other day, why not just ignore spammy backlinks and thereby eliminate Negative SEO. If the intention was to slap the wrists of Black Hat SEOs, seems a better strategy would be to ignore them thereby letting SEOs to continue to spend time building link networks that don't make any difference in the target site ranking and at the same time eliminating the potential for Negative SEO.

I'm sure I've overlooked something in creating this hypothesis? What am I missing here?
#backlinks #ignore #penalize #spammy
  • Profile picture of the author Justin Tyme
    Spammy backlinks are in essence ignored.

    When the latest updates rolled out, it didn't necessarily "penalize" people because of their spammy links. Instead it "ignored" all spammy links, thereby destroying rankings because thousands of links just didn't count anymore overnight.
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    • Profile picture of the author consultant1027
      Originally Posted by Justin Tyme View Post

      Spammy backlinks are in essence ignored.

      When the latest updates rolled out, it didn't necessarily "penalize" people because of their spammy links. Instead it "ignored" all spammy links, thereby destroying rankings because thousands of links just didn't count anymore overnight.
      If this was all that was happening, then there would be no reason for the link disavow function Google implemented.

      ---

      I can see how a site that ranked good due to lots of links was indirectly "penalized" when sites that link to it lose their link "juice." But again, why would there be a need for a link disavow tool if essentially a link from a spammy site can't give a site it's linking to "bad" link juice?

      It's like saying you need to disavow this link because we think you are associated with this site simply because it links to you. I still don't get the thinking.
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  • Profile picture of the author FineSEO
    Are there some real examples when people got hurt by competitors black seo?
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    I think the idea was to discourage the practice altogether. If they just ignored spammy links, spammy links would still work to rank pages because their filter does not accurately find them all. By penalizing a site once it reaches some threshold, the idea, I would imagine, was to discourage people from ever wanting to use them.

    Of course, it had unintended consequences.
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