With all those notorious hundreds of thousands of algorithm changes, millions of flags and billions of free testers, Google is helpless.
No, I am actually quite serious. There’s really only one reason why they started all the removal / disavow craziness: They are helpless.
Their algorithms are not working against spam and their human reviewers are not enough to clean the web: So they decided to scare the hell out of us to make us help them correct their deficiency.
* It’s up to you if you want to be part of their helping brigade. I for one prefer to stay away and just keep doing what I think is right.
I am not even blaming them but seeing where it takes the web is sad. People are afraid of linking but if you think about that links are heart, sole and the actual base of the whole web. If we kill links, what’s left?
Google *may* be actually meaning good (which is doubtful considering the amount of confusion they seem to be purposely spreading): Stopping spammers is essential but at what cost?
Yes, there’s a probable solution: Nofollowing links. But this stinks…
@jimboykin Yeah, no man is an island, but every web site will be. Gonna go find a good walled garden
— jimbeetle (@jimbeetle) August 15, 2013
I mean aren’t we supposed to write for humans? Aren’t links supposed to be part of our writing, hence don’t they need to be for humans? Why do we need to think if we want to give credit when linking? Why are we forced to think if we are *allowed* to link?
And the link removal requests… Google wants us to scare each other and *do our best* to remove all links before we can be reconsidered. They want us to join their FUD campaign and help them (it’s sad that most of us do!)
I saw many very good people getting very scared by one of the following:
Contents
Please change: Polite
This one is almost perfect. You explain nicely what your problem is and ask politely to change your link. If I were removing the links, I’d be doing this one:
Please nofollow: Polite
This one was quite good as well: Very polite, very personal and coming from the official email and the real person:
Please remove links: ~Polite
This one is worse but still good.
This one is a bit more polite:
Remove: Threaten with Disavow
It hate it: People threaten with Disavow (Google has never confirmed that being disavowed means red flags but we know it is evil enough to use that info against us!)
Remove: Bogus DMCA
This isn’t even the proper DMCA notice! No content is used on the site! But it’s scary and in my case, my hosting company even threatened me with deleting my files from the web!
I’d say this is the dirtiest, yet, sadly most effective.
Which have you gotten and what did you do? Ignored? Removed? I know people tried charging money for removing nofollow links. What if you are threatened?
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This was part of one of the “gems” I received…
“I appreciate you are probably very busy, but ideally it would be great to have these links removed in the next 24/48 hours. Do let me know if there is anything further you need from me.
If we do not hear back from you in next few days we will have to take the step of contacting your hosting company as the links are effecting our Google rankings and business.
We will be informing Google of sites that have not complied with the removal of links within the next five days and would hope the links pointing to our company website can be removed prior to this happening.”
The list of links included 12, all of which were various pages WordPress created off of one post (the post, the author archive page, the author archive page feed, the category page, etc. All over a link they placed in the author bio of a guest post.
LOL Good thing they appreciated you were busy, Kristi 🙂
Terry Simmonds does an excellent job describing which issues he has with link removal requests: https://plus.google.com/u/0/107547897649550914425/posts/QYSD1E9YstA
Takeaways:
1) Oftentimes they are sent form a different email address that has nothing to do with the link
2) Many of them are automated
3) Many people who send emails on behalf of clients are uneducated (they don’t even know what nofollow is)
4) Many other
Looks like link removal requests are outsourced to cheap services, so the actual sites haven’t really learned any lesson. First they outsource link building to cheap unreliable services, now they let the same cheap unreliable services email link removal requests on their behalf!
Those are great samples to use for removing links. I will be sure to keep these in mind, especially with Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms. I am sure this will improve a website’s SEO quality as well. Thanks for the tips!
I’ve been undertaking a ‘polite’ link removal campaign for one of my clients following placement of many poor links by their former SEO guy and, I have noticed MANY webmasters trying to take advantage of this opportunity by requesting a small payment for removal.
Clever yet frustrating, but what can you do?
i want to use your service i did not find your email anywhere on your wesbite so i need to post here.
contact me now.
Hemu