On: A harassment campaign on Goodreads

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I have heard (but don't have personal experience of etc) that there is a similar tactic for “negative SEO”. Often people try to spam links to their own site to boost PageRank, leading to Google etc picking up on this and ranking websites worse for it, leading to people spamming links to competitors' sites so Google will penalise them.

[oneeyedpigeon → TazeTSchnitzel]

Wouldn’t that problem disappear if google just ignored spam links rather than penalising them?

[yellow_lead → TazeTSchnitzel]

This is a thing and it can be combatted by "disavowing" links through Google webmaster tools somehow, I believe.

Of course that doesn't work for other search engines though.