Penguin update not only damaged lot of Businesses it also helped people to make money through deceptive means. After penguin update website owners / webmaster scrambled to clean up their back link profile. They sent out 100s of request for link removals to their site. In this process they not only targeted bad links but also good natural links to their site. Reason they don’t know which one is good and which one is hurting their site. Many malicious elements took advantage of this situation. They starting charging money to remove links from their site. Link removal charges range from as low as 2 dollar per link to as high as 50 dollar per link.
So Google did help someone? No not in the good way but in a way that will damage the reputation of their algorithm. Funny thing here is some of the requests webmasters make they don’t even know those links exist till they get the unnatural links email from Google. Some of the link removal requests were targeted towards links the webmaster did not add at all. Even I have personally sent out emails to links that don’t even know it ever exists. We never created those links nor know whether they existed. We found out about those links only through webmaster tools links data. So Google allowed one more scam money making industry where a site owner maliciously places someone links and wait for it to show up in webmaster tools data. As soon as it shows up and the site owner gets a unnatural links penalty. They request the scammer to remove the link and site owner is asked to pay for the link to be removed.
One example email where we got offer of $5 to remove link from our pages.
“Hope you are doing well,
I emailed you on February 20 regarding removing links from your website http://www.example.com that
are pointing to my website http://exampleaffectedsite.com/.
If possible, I would like you to update our links from the following pages:
http://www.example.com/exampleURL/
http://www.example.com/example/page/3/
http://www.example.com/example/feed/
And either remove our link from the page or add a re”nofollow” attribute to the links.
I understand that this task may take some of your time up and we are willing to compensate for that. Please let me know how much it will cost us for you to remove our link from your website. Right now we are paying out $5 per link removal
I would also like to clarify that you are not the only person that we are reaching out too for link rel”nofollow” and link removal process. We want to make sure that our website’s authority will not be decreased due to the new Google updates.
Please get in touch as soon as possible to confirm that you received this email and updated the link information above. The alternative solution for us would be to send a Disavow Link report to Google which is something that may decrease your authority with Google.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to receiving your reply.
Mark ( Name changed )
”
One more email asking us $10 to remove link.
“Dear webmaster/owner of example.com,
Most likely you have sent an email before, however, no response was sent. Unfortunately, I am have to contact you until the issue is resolved.
I am contacting you on behalf of Example company, www.examplecompany.com, regarding your link(s) listed on your website: examplecompany.com. Please know that we are charging a small fee of $10 to remove any links you want removed from our site.
Please let me know if you want the links removed from our site and if you need any additional assistance from me.
Link location: http://examplecompany.com/car_shippinglinks.html
Thank you for your time… I really appreciate your immediate attention in this matter. I will be happy to provide more details about Google Penalty and best practices upon your request.”
