Having a blog often brings me strange emails. Usually from well-meaning marketers, who’ve found me on some list of female bloggers and would therefore like to offer me the exciting opportunity to review their sippycups or diaper bags or something else completely useless to me. Sometimes I get offers for guest posts, offering free access to an archive of clearly spun content with sponsored backlinks. Sometimes these emails are addressed to Ms. Paradox, which is going to be my superheroine name whenever I get powers. Internet marketing is a weird place, is my point.
The other day, I got the oddest one yet.
My name is ********, I’m webmaster of website livedatesearch.com.
I would like to kindly ask you to remove links to our website from your website.
They have been placed by mistake and are currently making negative impact on our website according to data from our Google Webmaster panel.
Therefore I would like to ask you to remove links to our website http://www.livedatesearch.com/ from the following page: https://simpsonsparadox.com/2006/09/not-quite-a-mud-mask.html
I kindly ask you to do this as soon as possible.
I’ve never heard of LiveDateSearch, so I was pretty confused. When I looked at the post in question, I discovered the link was in the form of a signature in commentspam. Usually Akismet is very good at catching and weeding out the comments left by a bot with the sole purpose of creating a backlink, but somehow this one had slipped through comment moderation.
Looks like the spam left on my blog is hurting the spammer’s search rankings. I’m terribly sorry about any inconvenience that spamming my blog has caused, and I’ll immediately fix it for you!
Right after I test out these sippycups.
haha!
I’m getting similar things, except from companies who several years ago were told that it was useful to get links to their sites from press releases, and are now frightened witless that links are going to cause the Big G to drop them from search engine results.
I partly blame Google because what to me look like perfectly legitimate links (they weren’t bought, are relevant, and weren’t placed on a spam blog) have been implied to be an issue when the likes of Mr Cutts speak, and I partly blame companies’ SEO advisers who seem to be paranoid.
Yes, removing some of these links might help a little, but a number of the emails I get are quite threatening, spouting phrases like “if you don’t remove my links, I will disavow your website and your own Google rankings will suffer”. This is despite the fact that Google uses hundreds of metrics to determine ranking, and would be foolish to place so much weight on links (otherwise malicious companies could attempt to ‘de-rank’ their competitors quite easily)
It just goes to show how much power Google has, if not completely in reality then in the minds of those who make a living or gain from SEO.
The dilemma: do you remove the spam comments from your nice blog, or do you cave into the request to remove the links that they put there?
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