Some of you people really border on clinical paranoia. I would seriously seek professional help and get yourselves on some medication. I'm constantly seeing threads about "evil google", "google taking over the world" "google stealing your data".
Google are a company trying to make profit, they're not a group of crazy cultists who thrive on destruction.
Everything you see you're interpreting as sinister. I'm not joking when I say that it's borderline clinical paranoia.
Do you know what I see as a level-headed businessman with an understanding of how companies operate?
I see a company who are facing changing times with the increase in mobile advertisers and the decrease in regular web advertisers who are making some radical changes to maintain growth going forward. They've been losing market share for a while now and it's something that they're trying to slow down and potentially reverse.
With that in mind Penguin was about taking some drastic measures to reduce spammy sites and provide a better user experience so they can start to regain market share.
However, they screwed up and ended up with a mess on their hands. They were probably toying with the idea of a disavow tool ever since bing released one (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/06/27/disavow-links-you-don-t-trust.aspx) and it's likely they had a team working on it for a potential release along side penguin.
My opinion is that they probably weren't 100% sure whether or not to push out their own disavow, but when things got messed up so badly with utter garbage ranking for terms like 'viagra' they decided they would roll it out to help fix the damage.
What the hell do you people think happens in their board meetings? Do you seriously think they decided "Hm, let's copy bing's disavow tool, except instead of the purpose being to protect against negative seo, what we'll do is use it to find out what bad links are!"
Do you think Google don't already know what bad links are? Do you think they need US to tell them? Jeeez..
Out of all the millions upon millions of sites that are going to be submitted across the entire network, you think having a few blog networks in there is going to be damaging?
Do you think they just add every site to a "PENALIZE" list if someone disavows?
Maybe you think if X number of people disavow a link then they might add to it to "PENALIZE". If so it would have to be a pretty large number so a few blog networks in there is hardly going to make any difference.
The only thing Google will potentially do is create some sort of algorithm to analyse the sites in the disavow that integrates with their existing algorithms for determining low quality links.
This whole conspiracy theory nonsense is just utterly embarrassing. I don't know what's happened lately at bhw, but it feels like I'm on some 'alternative' forum full of tinfoil-hat lunatics.
This is suppose to be a forum full of intelligent business people.
I am sure high authority sites are afforded a lot of protection, just as you cannot perform neg SEO on amazon for example. However, many gov/edu sites are autoapprove and are targets of link spammers for their perceived authority as a result of their tld. If enough people submit links on these domains to the disavow tool, then yes they would probably be blacklisted. Not blacklisted in the sense that the gov/edu's site would go down in rankings, rather that any links from that site would be devalued.
Google would have to be pretty retarded to do something as stupid as that.
"Yeah, let's just completely forget our existing algorithms and instead we'll just use a really super-simple system where if X number of people disavow a link we'll blacklist that site and provide a penalty for sites it links to"
I'm embarrassed for anyone that thinks that's a good way for a search engine to rank sites.
only thing they care about is filling bank accounts, and this is achievable by playing with big guys