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
-
Gathering links
There are numerous "Ultimate Guides" to linkbuilding, outreach, etc., and they are all written to teach you the art of linkbuilding. The only thing these guides don't tell you is that following them takes a massive amount of time and doesn't guarantee to get good links at all. We're all in online marketing, and maybe we online marketeers are familiar with linking to other websites, posts that we like, etc. and maybe that's why we can write these guides but in other niches it really doesn't work that way 🙂 I'm wondering what techniques/tactics/strategies you guys are using in less straightforward niches to get quality links to your blogposts. To give you an idea, we launched an article a couple of weeks ago targeting a very competitive keyword. The article got shared over 100 times on LinkedIn/Twitter/etc. and already ranking pretty good, but REAL backlinks are still missing. How to get people to link to that article?
Link Building | | jorisbrabants0 -
Getting links before launch
I'm lunching my site in a month and a half, should I start getting links for my domain? (I allready own it
Link Building | | amielsosa0 -
Pursuing Links on Sites You Have a Link From
Is it a bad idea to spend resources to get a second link from a site that already links to you? It seems like the marginal value of each additional link is much smaller than the first link.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me?
Hi All, I hope you can help. Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me? but I know for a fact there are. Why is this? I have submitted my site to a few local directories and can see my site is on their site but when I run a Link Analysis it shows that I have no links. Does anyone know why this is? Many thanks, Aidan My site is http://www.theethicalsilkco.com/
Link Building | | aidanlawlor0 -
Editorial links
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/17484 how do you get a link from an article like this where the author writes for a high domain authority site and just ends up listing a lot of links to different companies?
Link Building | | JohnWalker0 -
Should you proactively remove spammy links?
Occasionally I notice spammy sites linking to us. Should I proactively try to request that they take down the links to avoid getting penalized? Or should I just wait for Google to provide a disavow link tool.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Too many external links vs linking root domains - good or bad?
Hi guys, After the latest Linkscape update, we noticed that our website have 424,671 external links with 4,395 linking root domains, so roughly 100 links/domain. Does Google consider this to be a negative thing or we do not need to worry about it. Many thanks. David
Link Building | | sssrpm0 -
Buying links
I have 2 websites to pay monthly to gain links from, number 1 is on the homepage of a directory, it has a PA of 90 and DA of 88.
Link Building | | myloseo
the link will be on the right hand side along with 55 other featured sites.
these links are there throughout the whole site. number 2 is from a website with 20 max sponsored links on a page and will be one of the sub pages on the site with a PA of 74. How valuable if any would these links be? My current pa on the site i wish to send the links to is 26 Can i expect my PA to go up by much? Also i currently have 317 links from 7 root domains on my site will this effect the rank of the paid links? Thanks in advance0