Shaddows - 3:08 pm on Jun 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

What if you x out some links that you think may be hurting you. Maybe you dont recognize them or just have a suspicion they are hurting you, what happens if you shoot yourself in the foot and actually cause your site to drop even more? Can you re-allow those links?

At a stab, no. Due diligence and all that.

Anyway, if I were Google, I would use this like the canonical tag- a strong hint. Disavowed and dodgy, fair enough. Disavowed but not currently suspect? Dampen like hell and feed into the new Paid Link detection algo that I've just written to utilise all this funky free data. Silently reinclude or nix as appropriate.

Capturing data in a meaningful way can be the only reason for a delay that I can see. I mean, a "block" icon and a virtual backend "nofollow" can hardly be that difficult, can it? Especially as they NF things on their own anyway.