Disambiguating on the wrong layer
Attempted twice, in two different forms, three days apart. The first: if systems confuse you with similarly-named domains and inherit their reputation, say on your own page that you are not them. This was the single most evidence-backed item in the whole record. It was never shipped — and two weeks later the confusion was gone anyway: five citations, all the real domain (overview [1]).
Had it been implemented, the site would carry a permanent list of disreputable domain names in its own copy, in service of a problem that resolved without it. And it could never have worked on its own terms: the failing system had never loaded the page, so nothing written on the page could reach it.
The second form shipped, and was removed the same day. A structured-data field was written to clarify what the site was not, naming the category it kept being mistaken for.
Every reader that actually reached the site had identified the category correctly, every time. The query that got it wrong — which returned three fast-food chains — had never fetched the site at all, and was answering from general knowledge about restaurant uniforms.
Two things were wrong with it, and only one is about layers. The field was an ordinary description with no conditional behaviour, so it would be relayed in answers where nobody was confused — and a sentence reading "this is not merchandise" puts merchandise in front of every reader who had never thought of it. Negation introduces the concept it denies.
None of which is an argument against stating what you are not. The opposite, in fact — the strongest line on the same site is one, and it outperformed everything the site claimed positively (credence).
So the distinction is not denial versus silence. It is what you are denying
and where. Those four are absences of mechanics, stated as facts about
the thing, in a file a reader chose to open. The structured-data field named a
category, argued against it, and surfaced unprompted in answers to
people who had never raised it.
A fix belongs on the layer where the failure happens. Twice this reached for on-page disambiguation and twice the confusion was upstream of the page. The failure was retrieval, and retrieval is what eventually got worked on — robots.txt, a sitemap, real 404s, followable links to the machine-readable files. Whether that is what moved the answer is not established, and two weeks of domain age is a live alternative. But it was at least aimed at the right layer, which neither copy fix was.