New Links Tool Provides Spam Too
Posted by jonathan at 11:22am EST on 02/09/2007
The recently launched linkback analysis tool also comes with a health helping of spam. I noticed this first when it was released and I was hoping it would be dealt with…but to no avail, it’s still there.
Hopefully the new tool will be updated soon so this doesn’t appear anymore…it’s taking up most of my screen!
Ryan Pham
Feb 9th, 2007
Actually Jonathan, I thought it was good that Google is displaying these spammy inbound links, at least webmasters could know the quality of their inbound links hehe.
But they might want to have a console for webmasters to flag these urls as spam and if there are enough instances that a url or website is report as spam the system automatically takes it out.
This could help them tackle the spam problem don’t you think
Jonathan
Feb 9th, 2007
Ryan: It could be viewed as a good thing, but there should be a way to filter our those sites so it can clear up the tool for better display.
Another problem is that there backlinks aren’t true backlinks. The tool includes links that are nofollow’ed as well which Googlebot doesn’t actually follow for Pagerank value. This is a problem because you don’t really know where your strong links are coming from.
It’s still in it’s amateur stages and I think it has room for some major growth, but it will end up being an amazing tool for webmasters.
shorty114
Feb 11th, 2007
Which reminds me, isn’t Google supposed to be king of spam stopping? I mean, Gmail does it fine, it can’t be that hard to stop link spam. Referrer Karma does the job fine IMO.
Jonathan
Feb 11th, 2007
Shorty: yes, they should be…but there are still tons of spam sites in the Google index. This is a problem that should have been sorted out prior to the release of the product, but hopefully we’ll see some updates soon from Google.