Penguin 2.0 Link Removal Request Etiquette
Since Penguin 2.0 hit a couple of weeks ago, a number of clients have received a large volume of requests to remove links from their sites that goes something like this:
“I recently received notice from Google that my website has been assessed a penalty after they “detected unnatural links” pointing to my website http://www.spamdawber.com/. Can you please remove the links to my site from the following URLs:
http://www.clientsite.com/spammy-profile
If the link doesn’t get removed, we are going to have to to file a “Disavow Link” report with Google. If we do this, it may affect your site’s Google rankings…Thanks!”
I got one of these last week for someone who had somehow gotten through my hi-tech security system and comment-spammed this site a few years ago.
Of course I am always happy to help a screwed website in need, but in most of these cases, it appears that the spammers were also building spammy links to the client sites in an attempt to drive PageRank to the /spammy-profile URL to either get that URL ranked or flow it back to the spammer site linked from the profile.
And of course, Google doesn’t know that the spammer built the link to your site, it just knows your site has a spammy link.
So Spammers, when you are requesting link removal, how about also providing a list of all of the spammy links you have built to the site in question so we can clean this crap up and protect our own rankings?
“Nothing is less important than which fork you use. Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is ethics. It is honor.” – Emily Post
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