Another Reason to Avoid Building Spammy Links
Most of us know the risks involved with buying links, automating link building through spammy tools and using the likes of Fiverr.com for link building. It can often be looked at by webmasters as a cost effective link building strategy, and if I’m honest, it can work great for a couple of months. It’s not exactly a long-terms strategy though.
A New Opportunity for Spammy Webmasters
Whilst working on a recent Google Penalty Removal project, I found that some webmasters have been trying to squeeze every last penny out of their websites by demanding payment for link removals. Here’s one of the replies I had from a webmaster asking for $100…
Thank you for contacting us. Since the software we are running does not allow to simply search for the link the search has to be done manually. Do to the amount of time this takes we charge $100 per link removal. Please make a paypal payment to XXXX@XXXX.com and your link will be removed within 24 hours. Best Regards
We actually sent them a full list of the exact link locations on their website (http://www.poetic-dictionary.com/), so I’m not sure about what manual work needs to be done here. We have had a few directories come back to us in particular; some of them only asked for a small amount of around $10, which we accepted when there was genuinely some time involved on their part.
What Are Your Options
You have two options when faced with this:
- You can pay the fee and ensure that the link has been removed by the webmaster. This can be OK if you only have a few links, but when you’re talking thousands, it doesn’t really become viable.
- Refuse the request and disavow the link. With this option you have to bear in mind that it might take some time for Google to process the disavow request, and in the case of having lots of links on the domain you may need to disavow the entire domain – thus preventing you from ever getting a legitimate link from that site in the future.
My advice would be to make sure that you’re as specific as possible within your webmaster outreach email. Leave them to do as little work as possible and you will find that they will rarely ask you to pay. If you leave them to do all the work themselves then they’re more likely to want to be compensated.
Alternatively what I’ve tried is contacting the host and being transparent about what this site is doing. A gentle nudge from the host usually results in the site complying with the removal request, rather than charging for it.
Good idea, Mark. I hadn’t thought about that so might give it a try.