So essentially he is saying, "do not worry, this is not a problem for you."
Just for fun decided to look into inbound links in webmaster tools for my site. Out of 3.3k links almost 3k links with all kind of non-relevant keywords from obviously spammy sites. Not sure why it is done, probably something about google's bot to see legitimate links next to spammed ones..
It is nice they have this new tool to devow links, but it is not linked anywhere from webmaster tools and you can find it only after you watched this youtube post (thank you BTW, just sent request to devow all these spammy links)
Ah gotcha, I guess that's pretty much all google can do. They also unfortunately validate it as a tactic against people/small companies that wouldn't otherwise realize: 1. They have a bunch of spammy links pointing to them, 2. That the links are negatively affecting them, and 3. They can do something about it.
Maybe it would be nice of them to email webmasters to notify them that they're being punished by spammy links, but I guess this would defeat the point of punishing it in the first place (as opposed to just not counting them towards the page rank).
They actually do send an email alert. I didn't find an authoritative blog post on the subject, but here's a post from a reputable SEO site discussing these email alerts:
Just for fun decided to look into inbound links in webmaster tools for my site. Out of 3.3k links almost 3k links with all kind of non-relevant keywords from obviously spammy sites. Not sure why it is done, probably something about google's bot to see legitimate links next to spammed ones..
It is nice they have this new tool to devow links, but it is not linked anywhere from webmaster tools and you can find it only after you watched this youtube post (thank you BTW, just sent request to devow all these spammy links)