For the past couple years, I've added a note in all the disavow uploads suggesting something like:

# please let webmasters only get links counting when they approve them!
# This would stop bad seo AND negative seo right?
# webmaster console can have option to choose only to count links that
# are approved in the console – if it was piad for bad seo and they approved the
# links then that would be proof. If it was negative seo attack they would not be
# approved and not count against.

Not only would this stop negative seo attacks, it would also make it explicit if a website was trying to use shady seo - only manually approved links would count - so if someone checked off 300 comment links and 100 wikis or whatever, there would be no doubt the intent..

It would make shady seo and negative seo harder, and make it easier for those getting attacked.

Today it also hit me that if this went through, it could prevent google bombing miserable failure and such perhaps as well - and I can see reasons that could be considered good, and reasons others might not want to make that option-able.

I read a while back that googlers most likely won't be reading any of the disavows or info contained within, but I get the same feels from posting in the webmaster forums - that purposefully making it so no one knows if google has seen the posts.

I'm sure there are good reasons for that, like secrets of the algo, and legal reasons for avoiding things... but it's really hurtful to so many.

One of the last times I get into a thread, after research from some 'top posters' or whatever they are called - they just said something like 'with some key phrases there is and has been so much spam and so many different spam techniques that they just freeze the results and put a few in the top and the rest far down. So there is no hope of getting those changed.

We have more legitimate questions about certain things, and debated in house whether using a bunch of google's things (analytics, fonts, tag mgr, all the things)- we might do better - that seemed not fair at the time, and then what a few weeks ago someone posts on HN abour seo and one of the main things is 'use all of google's scripts' advice..

I becomes a conflict of interest I think, and a conflict for our users and their privacy with sensitive subjects - yet others are willing do that all day for the G traffic - and they get top results.

It's been a funny (and not so funny) thing at the home office seeing a top sex result running google ads. There are so many conflicts when trying to do certain things with google - and trying to do what's right is not what is shown to the world as working, it's frustrating.

I suppose a big goal for the g spam team has been to try to make figuring things out for seo people really frustrating - and I have seen the result watching so many others explain how they did good results for a while then kicked out.. and not just bad links, but having good content.. so the goal of frustrating so many has been achieved.

On the flip side, google publicly has said for a long time, make a good site with content the visitors want to enjoy - don't buy links, and you will do fine the results. Well this does not seem true today and has not for years now.

again, small data point, ymmv