Jeremy Palmer is a SEO marketer, who also appears to be doing some scammy affiliate thing. Google considers his links low quality because they are low quality.
> Google considers his links low quality because they are.
So what? Why should I have to care that Jeremy Palmer (or any other person) is linking to my site?
The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google. That is not natural or desirable behaviour. Site owners shouldn't have to care about that. Many have resorted to adding 'nofollow' to all of their own outbound links for fear of being punished by Google for linking to 'spammy' sites and appearing to be part of a paid/circular links scheme.
It all sounds very broken to me.
Note: I have no interest in SEO whatsoever, and I only have a single low traffic web site.
If you've got bad links, just disavow them. Wikipedia has to nofollow links because anybody in the world can add a spammy link to an article. NYT nofollows links because they're old media, and don't understand the web.
People use nofollow because they believe (rightly or wrongly, none of us know for sure since it's a secret) that if you link to a site that later turns out to be a link farm you can be punished for it because it appears to Google that you are part of the paid links scheme. 'Turns out' meaning either it was a link farm all along and you didn't notice, or didn't think it mattered, or because the site got bought/hacked and now is just a link farm. (I'm using 'link farm' in the broadest possible sense here since I'm not familiar with all the various ways a site can be deemed to be engaging in paid links and I believe there are quite a few and it's intentionally vague).
Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits.
Additionally, manually disavowing links hardly seems like a scalable solution. As somebody with a small website that I spend very little time maintaining, I don't want to have to regularly be checking some Google console for 'bad links'that I have to manually disavow to prevent getting delisted.
> Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits.
Breaking internet connectivity is a downside for society as a whole.
> The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google.
That's because previously webmasters we going around trying to get links to their sites added because it might get them rewarded by Google.
Google is trying to prevent the aberrant behaviour that the success of Pagerank caused in the structure of the Web, unfortunately there can be some collateral damage.
Justice? The people who were afraid of Google's reaction where the ones he linked to, not Jeremy Palmer himself. Even if he is a spammer, how is this justice?
It is really sad that instead of discussing the merit of his argument, we are debating the quality of OP's site.
It is ridiculous that I have to police my site for low quality inbound links or risk getting banned (even more so for mom and pop webmasters who are more susceptible to link penalties). Lastly, if you are penalized, try recovering unless you are big brand like Overstock or JCPenney with millions per year in Adwords spend.
He might have low quality links, but his points are still valid. it's not our perogative to link the way Google us to. We should link however we want, and it is up to Google to figure which is link is good, and which are bad.
> it's not our perogative to link the way Google us to.
Who said it was? Google didn't ask him to do anything. A random person on the internet did. I frequently get emails from random people on the internet who ask all sorts of insanely idiotic things that have little basis in reality.
> Apparently Google convinced them, via their Webmaster Tools portal, that the link looked “unnatural”, and that they should use the Link Disavow Tool to discredit the link.
Yes and that's exactly my point. The email doesn't mention anything about Google, it just says they are cleaning up their links and if it's not a big deal please delete the links on your site. This isn't uncommon, just like it's not uncommon to get emails soliciting links.
The OP has come up with a theory about the backstory and then used that theory to blame Google for ruining the internet (ignoring the fact that the entire "credit" he wants is Google's invention in the first place).
The most likely situation is that the company who sent the letter hired a shady SEO. That SEO did spammy things that got them penalized. They brought in a new SEO to clean up the mess, and that SEO is trying to undo all the damage the previous one caused. They are trying to remove every link they can find since they didn't do the spamming in the first place and don't know which are causing the problem.
Google doesn't tell you exactly what links to remove when you have an unnatural links penalty. They'll often give you 2-3 examples but then it's up to you to determine which links were made with the intentions of manipulating Google and then asking for removal.
The letter from the company asking to remove the links reveal they used a shady SEO company to generate artificial inbound links. Not a surprise that Google got some false positives -- particularly coming from a SEO blog.
Really? It often seems like the original PageRank algorithm was using links as a measure of content quality and relevance, and now everyone claims they are. But thanks to SEO, we saw that was false (homework question: would it still be true in an Internet where all actors are committed to creating "good" content?). I think links are independent of content quality (or rather search result ranking, because quality is subjective), and we need better AI based solely on page content.
Consider the argument the author is making, rather than addressing his person. The argument is:
The tail named Google is wagging the dog named Internet by sending thousands of web masters on a wild goose chase of policing sites outside their direct control, essentially the entire internet. It's a giant waste of human capital, and it only exists due to Google's dominant market position and their willingness to solve problems of their search algorithm at the expense of the third parties.
