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A comment on A harassment campaign on Goodreads. Parent comment

Re:A harassment campaign on Goodreads by TazeTSchnitzel on Monday January 06, 2020 @06:43PM (#21974868)
I have heard (but don't have personal experience of etc) that there is a similar tactic for “negative SEO”. Often people try to spam links to their own site to boost PageRank, leading to Google etc picking up on this and ranking websites worse for it, leading to people spamming links to competitors' sites so Google will penalise them.
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Re:A harassment campaign on Goodreads by oneeyedpigeon on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @05:37AM (#21978723)
Wouldn’t that problem disappear if google just ignored spam links rather than penalising them?
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Re:A harassment campaign on Goodreads by yellow_lead on Monday January 06, 2020 @07:22PM (#21975236)
This is a thing and it can be combatted by "disavowing" links through Google webmaster tools somehow, I believe.

Of course that doesn't work for other search engines though.

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