Disavow?

[BentAnat]

So in light of Penguins and Pandas and the whole animal farm that is Google's SEO, MS seems to have found an interesting (if logical) way to combat negative SEO.
Simply Disavow the links.

I first saw it on the SEOmoz newsletter this morning, and as such don't really know if it's new or not, but I found it interesting, as it's so simple. Suddenly, negative SEO is substantially less of an issue, if this is implemented correctly, or am I simply missing a trick here?

http://www.bing.com/community/site_b...n-t-trust.aspx

[cash ninja]

I really don't like this idea personally. It's like admitting to the search engines that you know certain links are dodgy. Personally I haven't had any issues with unnatural link warnings but I have had sites link to my sites that on the face of it look a bit sketchy.
What do I do about those links? Nothing, I just ignore them. It's like the countless wikipedia and dmoz clones that scrape the content of those sites and build their own duplicates. Do I care about all those duplicate links? Nope.
Personally I think more harm than good can come from disavowing links but I'm only basing that on personal experience and maybe my views will change in the future if my experience differs down the road.

[BentAnat]

I hear what you're saying, and agree that for most SE's an accurate image of the web would be preferable.
That being said, disavowing links would be a way to stop competitors from buying 100.000 bad links from "free-rolex-watches-online-dot-com" and pointing them at your site (something that I know happens).

I don't think a flat "ignore this, pls" is the right way to go about it, but perhaps a way to "reset" your profile in a way would not be entirely bad?

[Clinton]

So, to help the SEs who are incompetent as what is really their job, we have to track who's linking to us and work out which are the good links/bad links and notify the SEs (one at a time)?!

What a preposterous idea!

[cash ninja]

I hear what you're saying, and agree that for most SE's an accurate image of the web would be preferable.
That being said, disavowing links would be a way to stop competitors from buying 100.000 bad links from "free-rolex-watches-online-dot-com" and pointing them at your site (something that I know happens).

I don't think a flat "ignore this, pls" is the right way to go about it, but perhaps a way to "reset" your profile in a way would not be entirely bad?

what do you mean by 100000 bad links? If you got that many links to your site from a single domain like 'free-rolex-watches-online-dot-com' as in your example then it would have little to no difference to your site. If you got 100000 links to your site from different sites, with that as the anchor text, then it would likely mean you wouldn't rank well for that (depending on what your overall link profile already looked like) but then who would be searching for that phrase anyway and why would you care?

I don't know what you mean by reset your profile either. Could you clarify what you mean by that?

[TheodoreK]

So, instead of people trying to promote their sites with regular SEO they are supposed to spend time on countering negative SEO, as part of their SEO campaigns?

That would make a new strain of SEO, the anti-negative SEO SEO and I think this is a somewhat ridiculous and counterproductive. Maybe the SE themselves could do something else to rank sites more effectively instead of trying to push that kind of volunteer work on webmasters themselves.

[bwelford]

Maybe the SE themselves could do something else to rank sites more effectively instead of trying to push that kind of volunteer work on webmasters themselves.

That would require that the search engines and particularly Google should cut down their very visible support for the whole mess of links and its usefulness in determining relevance. The present situation forces a huge amount of human energy both inside and outside Google to try to clean up the mess.

In my opinion, we all would be better off without the PageRank approach and all that it implies. However Google seems addicted to this failed concept.

[Chabrenas]

In my opinion, we all would be better off without the PageRank approach and all that it implies. However Google seems addicted to this failed concept.

The classic problem of a market-dominating company being tied into legacy solutions by its past investment. When (not if) a new kid on the block produces a significantly better solution and builds it up to cover at least one major sector of the searches performed, we'll discover whether Google's management is up to the challenge. They won't have to carry the cost of migrating their customer base like a software app company would, so it's more a question of attitude at CEO and board level. The signs aren't good, though.

[DaveMurphy]

Not really sure how you can say Google are addicted to the PageRank approach or that it's particularly failed. These days different people can and do see different results from the same search terms which may or may not be a good thing. There was a good TED talk on the subject last year from Eli Pariser http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk

I once heard someone refer to SEO as Search Engine Optimism and maybe it's getting long past time when people should be seeing search engine traffic as a nice bonus rather than a goal in and of itself.

[cash ninja]

Sorry Dave but I just can't agree with that last point. I think we are still a long way from the majority (or even a large minority) of websites being able to rely on other means apart from search engines for bringing in the majority of their traffic.

You have to get visitors to your website somehow. If not through search engines, then how? Links from other sites, right? Either that, or developing enough of a brand that people come direct to your site - that requires deep pockets and a big advertising budget to achieve.
If it's links from other sites, then the sites that are linking to you are, in effect giving approval to your site and that's the whole crux of the way search engines currently work.
Yes, they are incorporating other factors too, like social signals, recency of content, etc but links are still a factor.
If you don't use links, then how do you rank sites? The biggest brands at the top (as suggested on another thread)? Well all the big brands had to start somewhere and brands come and go. Just because someone is big today doesn't mean they are necessarily better.
The web is far too big for people to find information and sites without search engines, they serve a useful purpose.

If anyone is to blame for all this, it's Joe Public web searcher, unwilling to look past the first 5 or 10 search results in most instances, thereby making getting to the top of the results extremely lucrative and perpetuating this cat and mouse game between the search engines and those attempting to boost their rankings.

Of course, if someone does come up with a better way of cataloguing and presenting that information to web users then there will be suitcases full of cash awaiting them.