I also make people send an email from the domain so i know it is not a competitor trying to wipe out links. Really I don't care it is just less outbound links and it is 2 clicks to delete. The other week I had a lady who wanted every site that outranked her site for certain search terms gone.??? ok why would I waste time trying to educate and idiot? Delete is so simple. lol
This is the other side to negative SEO that people are unnaware of. Most folk see negative SEO as building spammy links to a website to make it look like the website owner has purposely tried to manipulate the SERPs through a quantity link build of crap sites. BUT Penguin has given them a double angle to work from. They can also approach good or even authoritative sites requesting their competitors link be withdrawn. When the link isn't removed they submit DMCA's or threaten to sue, and this usually scares the site owner into complying. Even Danny Sullivan is getting link removal requests. I wonder if he contemplated that it might be a competitor of the linked-to-site requesting the link withdrawal. It's not the burden I'm worried about. It's the insane panic. Webmaster's/SEO's are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Heck Barry Schwartz himself is leading the charge, making huge assumptions regarding what directories might have been de-indexed (with research we found that Barry's fears were misguided as no directories we list were de-indexed). The web is supposed to be about sharing information, and linking to information. If people are writing blogs and are going to be sued for who they link to, won't people just stop writing? Isn't that the kind of negative thinking that will destroy the web. This situation is far bigger than directories. What's happening to directories is miniscule in comparison to the consequences for the rest of the web, based on this ridiculous panic. The sane way to move forward, would be for Google itself to roll back the changes and the penalties. Neither has work as intended. They need to inject confidence into the web, not inspire fear. Now that they've seen what happens when "webmasters take the Google wheel", they need to never give them control again. Having the ability to discount links, from a webmaster perspective, is a ridiculous idea, because by it's very nature it creates a bias. Immediately you would have SEO firms offering shady "we'll discount your competitors" links services. And because they could solicit hundreds or thousands of voices to generate those discounting votes, Google would then take those votes as justification that the site being "voted to be discounted" deserves to be discounted. I agree. Treat every request with suspicion, especially if it comes with a threat. MC may have addressed website owners who have asked "what do we do if a site won't take our link down?", but he never addressed the other side of that coin which is "What do we do if the person asking for the link to be taking down, won't verify they are from the listed site?" --- Because by taking down links you may be inadvertently damaging clients who paid you to review/edit/list their site. It's almost a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. The key is. Don't panic. I should qualify that it is the variation that I have always suggested. Never build keyword phrases with the exact same anchor to saturate. That's an obvious dead giveaway. I do think if something is just a generic keyphrase that perhaps it needs the brand/site-name associated with it to help differentiate between listings. The goal posts are always changing, and that is why we evolve. Google from 5 years ago is far different than what it is today. Their content changes as situations on the web change. They were forced to introduce Penguin to combat webspam littering the results. We too need to look to our own content and see what changes WE can make that allow us to be unique and considered quality. Comes back to the basics really... editing Changing to just "site name" removes the link anchor benefit they were obtaining, and if they were under a penguin penalty, then it would help to diffuse that penalty too. It's all about overuse of exact same anchor text. The can of worms Google has unleashed is small potatoes for directory owners. The entire web is now under the threat of being sued unless they remove links. From one angle people are receiving legit removal requests from site owners who are being whipped into a panic by big name SEO'ers like Barry Schwartz. These site owners know not what they do. They are sheep following a misguided shepherd(s) and are being lead to their own demise. Even Google itself has basically said ignore the warnings we are sending, we have it covered. Read the articles I posted in my first post. Google is trying to put out the fire, but they are being so confusing no one knows what to do so they panic. From another angle people are receiving non-legit removal requests from unscrupulous site owners looking to take out the good links to their competition. Every link they successfully remove is a win for them and a loss for their competitor. It wouldn't be difficut to target say, one of your biggest competitors who might have 10,000 links. If you were able to successfully have 33% of those links removed through threats and demands, then you've gone a long way to damaging your competitor. This is one half of the negative SEO coin. The other half would then be turning around and spamming your competitor to crappy link places, and turning their profile from a once good one into junky spam, putting them into penalty, and removing them from the rankings. People that think this doesn't happen are ignorant. It's happening all over the place. It's real. Google and big name SEOs can say it's not that bad, but it is absolutely rife. The second Google flipped that switch, people used it to smash their competitors to shreds. It is why there are so many people running around saying "Why am I penalised?" errr cos your competitors took out your good links and replaced them with spam ones.... bye bye, end of your business. Google's solution? Go get a new domain name and start again! HAHAHAHA. Good points, and the referral traffic loss is well noted. The web is designed and even named after the nature in which we all link to one another. The way in which good websites are recommended by linking to them. If all of a sudden people are running around threatening to sue other people for linking to them, whose going to bother to link? I'm sure people will say they won't stop doing what they are doing. What about when you get hit with a lawsuit? What if your registrar decided to just end your domain registration? What about when your webhosts sides with the complainant cos they don't want to get sued and take your site down? People need to wake up to the massive damage Penguin has caused the second it hit the web. It's massive. It's not just about link removals. It's about the secondary, and tertiary consequences of them. Entire industries (and I'm not talking about directories) are going belly up, and the SERPs aren't any better than they were pre-Penguin or pre-Panda. In many cases they are actually worse. I've noticed 3 eHow articles ranking in #1, #2 and #3 for a term I have been following for several months now. The problem isn't eHow ranking, it's that the articles comprise wafer-thin unoriginal content spun, stolen or copied from somewhere else and presented as an authoritative voice on the particular issue. These sorts of low value content farms were supposed to be de-valued by Panda, so that real, unique content could rise to the top... Not so. Good point, so let's talk about just how websites not specifically directories are impacted by this algorithm change. In a post-penguin environment: You can be sued for who you link to (whether your site is a blog, forum, directory, website, whatever) Your webhost can remove content from your site, if a complaint is made regarding linking You can receive DMCA requests Negative SEO can be performed on your site (REMOVING good links to you) Negative SEO can be performed on your site (ADDING bad links to you) You can be penalised in Google, for infringements beyond your control You can be banned in Google, for infringements beyond your control How do we feel about post-penguin now. But... don't panic... yet... This is ok in an ideal world. But really whose going to remember all their registrations? It would take someone hours to go on a removal scavenger hunt. A better idea is just to ignore the warnings as Google has said. If we participate in link removals, we give it a legitimate voice, when it should've really been laughed at and dismissed.
Dan, it's good to see that we share a similar perspective on this situation. It's also good to see your continued contributions to the directory industry as a whole. Such dialogue will hopefully inspire thinkers to be more productive and effective in their future efforts in and outside of the directory industry. My only hope is that more people would slow down and look beyond the superficial tasks of link removals to see the bigger picture of what is happening. Some + rep coming your way.