Should I Pay For Link Removal?
-
Hi,
I'm in the middle of a link removal campaign and getting a lot of replies from site owners asking for payment or directing me to a link which is effectively a payment page.
The way I see it is my client is paying me to do their SEO. I'd rather be spending my time and their money building quality links, therefore the link removal process is in my way and requests for payment an insult.
However, I am not without sympathy for site owners being expected to remove links free of charge. After all there's absolutely no incentive for them.
So far I've had a zero tolerance attitude towards this and refused to pay, but just wondered what everyone else's opinion was.
On the other hand, many site owners have been very helpful and removed the links at my request. Is it the right thing for me to remove these domains from my Disavow Links file?
I'm finding it to be a bit of a moral conundrum to be honest!
-
Anthony, Marie, Chris, thanks a million for your responses, all most helpful.
Chris, it's funny you should mention this: "...site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you."
The most recent response I had from a site owner was exactly this. The email stated the link had not appeared there by chance, it had been placed free of charge by either my client, or someone acting on their behalf. Which is true, unfortunately.
Marie, the particular sites I'm dealing with at the moment I will never want links from in future
Thanks again for your responses, you've definitely answered my query.
-
You're right. There's no harm in including a file on your disavow even if they have removed your link. However, if you think you could get a natural link from this site in the future you may want to take it off of your list. (That's pretty uncommon though.)
There is a limit to the size of the disavow file (2 MB) but it's pretty hard to reach this limit. If you had a file that was too big then you'd want to not include sites that had removed your link already.
-
Paying for link removal is a conundrum since as you state the site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you. I have chosen to pay a couple that had been de-indexed from Google and even so, one did remove the links and the other has not.
As to your other question on removing sites from your disavow list that have been cooperative and removed the links, from what I have read there is no harm in disavowing them anyway. The risk is that some site owners may not have properly removed the link and it may come back. They may have temporarily redirected it to hide it or they don't know how to remove it possibly due to an older platform. I would be interested to hear from experts such as Marie on this point.
-
I almost never pay for link removal. John Mueller mentioned in a hangout that if you have a manual review then you can just make a note in your spreadsheet that the site owner asked for money and then just disavow that link.
However, if I have a site where I am really struggling to get links removed, I might recommend paying for a few to come down. I don't like to pay more than $10 per link though.
-
No, you do not have to pay for link removals. Document the request, note they asked for payment, and then disavow the site.
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-link-payment-17387.html
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
If I disavow bad links on "disavow link webmaster" will they still show up on my moz reports?
We recently found out we have a lot of bad links linking back to our website from spam sites, I disavowed them through the google disavow link webmaster. On my moz report it still shows the links, is that normal?
Link Building | | Ryan.Cruz0 -
Grr SEO linking.. I am not understanding why I wouldn't have lots more links.. Please help. Thanks
I have done the whole moz open exploer and I am not understanding why my site wouldn’t have more links registering to my website.. I have lots of sites(directorys and 3rd party) with my website domain in them. The only one that is linking to my site is BBB.com and my advertsing with saint paul press. www.somerersetautodealer.com But if I have links with all kinds of automotive directories why wouldn’t they register? I am sure this a simply answer or that I am not understanding something. Thanks for your help! Scott
Link Building | | Scott12340 -
Internal links
hey guys, these days should internal links within your site carry no-follow tags? or does it really matter? thanks!!
Link Building | | tm46150 -
No inbound links ?
Hello I just got SeoMoz, started the whole thing and compared myself to my competitor. I'm writing for mayor national newspapers in latin america, been featured a few major sites, and got a whole lot of links directing to muy site. I recently moved domains about a month ago from rxmagaizne.mx to rxmagazine.co. Is this the reason i'm not seeing any links ? ibIPY.png
Link Building | | timi-do0 -
Should I remove links from my internal blog?
I have blogs/news sites on every one of my clients' websites (each representing a different business within the same industry - self storage). On each of these blog sites, I have a writer who places about 3-5 exact keyword match links (varying anchor text) to give interlink juice to the other off-site businesses owned by the client. Each of these blogs receive about five posts per week. I am sure this is mega-over-optimizing and a stupid thing to do considering penguin. So, my questions are: Moving forward - 1. Should i stop adding so many blog articles to each site? 2. How many interlinking anchor texts should I use per blog? 3. Should I go back and either get rid of all those interlinks on past blogs or just trash the blog articles altogether? Please help if you can - I very much appreciate the responses best bd
Link Building | | creativeguy0 -
So I ran into a site that was not ranking 4 days ago and has over 2 million links to it on some keywords. My guess is this is a link bomb, but the issue is this is pushing one of my sites down. Does anyone know a good way to over come a bomb like this?
So I ran http://www.riogrande.com/ into this site not that long ago and wanted to see if any other SEO's have an opinion on it. I've seen a Google bomb before, but the amount of links going into this URL is insane. The thing is how does one over come a Google Bomb? Do you just wait to see what Google does or do you just hope to rank under that URL? I should also note that it appears that all the keywords to it are relevant to the sites content. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks
Link Building | | kateG12980 -
Reciprocal Links Or One Way Links?
After reading a recent blog post on guest blogging and ways to build relationships for link building purposes, I began to wonder about something. It is my understanding that one way backlinks are superior to reciprocal linkage, but reciprocal is better than no link at all. So is it still worthwhile to do reciprocal guest blogging, and will the value of the links be worth it when completed? Or should we just be of the opinion that: One Way Link > Reciprocal > No link
Link Building | | dignan990