With all the chatter around links, negative SEO, the tools, etc - Google's John Mueller said that the tools used to do automated link drops are "old school" and thus, Google has probably seen this behavior before. He basically said, Google is good at detecting them and ignoring these types of spam also.
Here are those tweets:
I think you're kinda asking if automated link-dropping has any effect, right? Those scripts are pretty old-school; if you can automate a link-drop somewhere, chances are we've seen that a lot of times there already.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 18, 2018
John again is saying here, don't worry about these types of negative SEO attacks. Google got it covered.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
