Google announced today on their Webmaster Central Blog that they have released a tool which will allow webmasters to disavow links that may be harming their search rankings. The new Disavow Links tool is intended for situations where a site receives low-quality or "spammy" links either because the site had poor SEO practices (paid links, link exchanges, etc.) in the past and can't get the bad links removed, or because of malicious behavior by someone deliberately intending to hurt the site's PageRank. So, if a site administrator lists a domain or page in his/her disavow list, Google will (in most cases) ignore links to the site from the offending domain or page when it is calculating PageRank.
In my opinion, this is long overdue. Google's stance on this issue previously was that if your site had links to it that were harming its rank, then your only real recourse was to get in touch with the offending site and ask that they remove the links in question. This is a rather idealistic approach - especially if the links are being generated by a malicious third party (a competitor, for example). If third parties have the ability to negatively affect your site's carefully crafted reputation without your involvement, then there has to be a tool available to allow you to take control of your own PageRank. The Disavow Links page is that tool.
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