Recently, one of the most requested Google Webmaster Tools features I have been hearing through the forums either directly or indirectly is the ability to mark links as links you do not vouch for.
Even though we have said time and time again that links can't hurt you, no one believes it. Not only do people feel they can hurt you, they feel they can kick you while you are down already, which makes it even worse. Once Google penalizes your site for having bad links pointing to it, Google expects you to contact the people linking to you and make them remove the links. Good luck with that!
That is why Webmasters want a feature to opt out links from counting in Webmaster Tools. Yahoo Site Explorer has it, so maybe Google should follow the lead. Here is how Yahoo Site Explorer works.
(1) Login to Yahoo Site Explorer
(2) Click on your inlinks link
(3) Mouse over a link and notice the "report spam" button:
(4) Click the report spam button and you are taken to this page to confirm the request:
After that, then supposedly, Yahoo won't count that link against you.
If SEOs and webmasters are expected to be responsible for the links pointing to them, even if they can't control all of them, then Google must give them a way to fully control which links are counting for good or bad.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Like The Story? Vote For It On Yahoo Buzz! Or On Sphinn!
rustybrick in Google Optimization at March 20, 2008 7:24 AM
Comments (4)
Comments
Very good commentary. I'd add that GWT seems to be lacking in functionality lately with lots of old and corrupt data. Not sure what the cause is maybe its just lack of interest, they moved some key people to other projects, or some inside politics. Either way, I don't foresee them making any big strides in the future as what they have now doesn't work. I don't have a problem with the program in concept, it wonderful when it works, but sometimes giving bad data is much worse than giving no data. The help group in inundated with people that believe they don't have links, no pages are indexed, or Google last crawled it in 1947, when in fact none of that is true. In the least they should warn people that the data given is not accurate and at best they should fix it.
It's great to see yahoo leading the charge in webmaster tools, it may be a key in their revival. Get the geeks and publishers on their side and who knows what they can do. If I were them I'd close the loopholes and make everyone have to log in when doing any sort of webmaster-y query such as checking links on other sites. It would be a captive audience prime for some salesmenship on the virtues of Yahoo.
But, what do I know?
Posted by JLH at March 20, 2008 10:30