Link removal... are you doing it?

[hawkwind dave]

A couple of months ago i was given a spread sheet with literally hundreds of 'bad' links pointing to a certain website... and I was asked to go through the list, contact each website and ask them to remove the link to our client. At the time i knew it was a futile task, a time consuming task and time which could be better spent.

Is anybody else doing bad link removal?

Are any of the bad links being removed?

I know google is recommending we try to remove our bad links... but seriously, does google really think we can get links removed from high-spam un-manned directories and the like?

[collusion]

I had someone asking for a link to be removed from one of my blogs that was posted by someone they hired to build links for them. The link was actually just a part of the URL field in a comment. The problem is that the link was relevant to my site, and the comment was very insightful and not spammy at all. It's my policy to allow comments that are insightful and not remove them. I guess if the link is bad, then you should go after them to get them removed, but don't make bad mistakes like the person that emailed me. I actually teach people marketing, and blog hopping is an ethical way of marketing and building links if they are relevant and the comment isn't just another "me too" or blatant spam.

[satnam1980]

I agree with your point that google is recommending we try to remove our bad links. But according to me google only recommending to remove paid links or those links whose not according to google terms and conditions. But I have never remove any link my self

[SteveGerencser]

We picked up a client and this was part of the cleanup routine to help get them out of their manual penalty. I think we got got some 20k links removed.

[LD]

I think we got got some 20k links removed.

Thats a ton of links Steve. How long would something like that take? Just curious.

[SteveGerencser]

We started doing site recovery and forensics back in January. The manual penalty had been in place for about 2 years at that point so it was pre- penguin / panda. There was a lot to do to the site and we decided to clean up the link profile while we were at it. Then Penguin hit so we were way ahead of the game. Even though the penalty has been lifted we still want to get about 10k more links removed just to clear any threshold issues that may linger.

[hawkwind dave]

crikey... 2K! I assume you didn't send two thousand emails to two thousand directories and had a 100% compliance rate?

[anisans]

I think Removing Link Is the New Linkbuilding of 2012.Believe it or not, Penguin has brought about a lot of good things in Google’s search engine. Spammy links are often created because a site is either not moderated at all or has very little moderation in the first place. Blog comments, forum profiles, article dumps, etc. These services claim to contact webmasters to have them remove the links

[liliana7]

But what do you do if they don't comply?

[hawkwind dave]

I think Removing Link Is the New Linkbuilding of 2012.
...

I doubt it.... removing links is no easy task and very time consuming. OK if you have hundreds of links from the footer of a single website you may be able to get rid of them, but hundreds of single links from shoddy directories are likely to be there for as long as the directory is.

Having tackled a spread sheet full of shoddy link locations, wasted hours and got nowhere... I'd rather spend my time trying to find better quality links.