Can I flag spammy links to my site that I didn't create?

"Is there a process through which a site owner could flag spammy links being built to their site by third parties (by a competitor for example)? How do you protect against sites being penalised for bad links which they have not built?" Laurence, London

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• Category

  Science & Technology

[Dan Bochichio]

If you don't want to watch the whole video. The short answer is "No, we don't currently offer that as a feature"

[Andy Fletcher]

Come on Matt, how hard can this really be? It's not even just competitors - what if in the past I used a link building strategy that now I wish I hadn't - surely it's in Google's interest to get from the webmasters reports on links that are low quality or non-editorial. No-ones going to to tell you they don't want the good ones now are they, so winners all around. You'd probably be able to use the data to more accurately pinpoint some of the crap out there.

[VictoriaPorscheGuy]

And in practice, it takes roughly several months for anything, if ever, to be resolved by using the disavow tool. You're still better off starting with a new domain. And/or supplementing with Adwords in the meantime (which I'm sure would thrill Matt & friends at Google)

[TheFitnessholiday]

I think Google does offer this feature now . You can now tell Google to disallow links to your site. It is called the 'Disavow tool' and is in Google Webmaster tools. Hope that helps :-)

[Sarah Bernier]

This is one thing I wish Google WOULD do. It just seems so unfair that sites get penalized for incoming links that they didn't create. And I don't imagine that the reporting mechanism would be used by anyone other than genuinely concerned webmasters, so there's little opportunity for abuse.

[seotastic]

is it really this simple a few of our sites got knocked in recent updates?

[internetmarketingau]

If you take away the ability for SEO companies to offer ethical white-hat SEO services to business, but then not provide the ability for companies to protect themselves against low quality back links and further more penalise these sites for factors essentially outside of the site owner's control... this is paving the way for a whole new era in black-hat SEO where the focus is now on destroying the search rankings of competitors rather than building the rankings of quality sites.

[jamavan]

This is so relevant now with the launch of the Penguin. If you're going to drop by traffic by 85% because of bad back links you used to ignore then for the love of god, give us a tool to report those!

[Rob Burns]

Translation - We do not offer that service as it would be a direct violation of our "eliminate any possibility for quality sites to produce valuable results so they will be forced to use our PPC advertising to stay in business policy"

[VictoriaPorscheGuy]

So in other words, we are SOL if a competitor goes out and decides to blast our site with a $15 linking campaign. Nice. Why in the hell wouldn't you allow webmasters to de-value those links from WMT? Doesn't that directly help the cause of better SERPs, whilst simultaneously "outing" bad neighborhoods, blog networks and the like?

The victim here is the white hat publisher with legitimate content. YOU ARE HANDING CONTROL TO THE BLACKHAT COMMUNITY.

Way to go, Google.

[Stephen Sumner]

I could quite easily pay a small amount of money have someone in India go and build shockingly bad links to a competitor site and that would leave me to do white hat SEO on my site.

I really do think Google should help honest webmasters have a way to clean-up their backlink profile if Google are going to start sending out warnings in Webmasters Tools.

[Anup Sindagi]

Here is the answer! Its NO! But think of it, would your competitor waste his precious time building irrelevant backlinks for you? No. You competitor better choose to build quality backlinks for his site.