The Poetic Justice Of Google Penguin

Posted on July 12, 2012

After Google rolled out the Penguin update and started sending out unnatural link warnings, black hats and grey hats alike have started to get busy cleaning up shady links.

This creates some sense of justice on the internet: The millions of websites that have been spammed now have the chance to pay back by keeping the spam on their sites. How ironic.

I just got forwarded this mail from one who tried to get some links removed. After contacting the website owner, he got the following mail back:

Dude, if you spammed my blog, why should I spend my time cleaning it up for you? I think you should have thought about that before you spammed me. Link stays.

Yes, annoying for those cleaning up links. But the website owner is right: you probably should have thought about it before you spammed.

(Pro tip: If you need to remove links and avoid this answer you might want to watch the SEOgadget webinar Adventures in Link Removal on Wednesday June 18th 2012.)

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http://twitter.com/ShahMenz Sha Menz

Hi Thomas,

This really is an area that is a little fraught – while it is easy to largely agree, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to analyze why some people are in a bad situation and what kind of impact link removals are having “at the other end” of link removal requests. All of this research to give us a basis for building our link removal tool, rmoov & with the aim of trying to lessen the burden for those receiving requests as much as possible.

As a result, I have come to the conclusion that, as with most things, there are two sides to every story (sometimes even more), and there are at least as many people who got into a situation through ignorance, naivete, or following bad advice, as there are people who knowingly put themselves there. Unfortunately for some, there are also sites out there that were once viewed as a good link source, but are now causing angst for people. One example is blogs that were originally very good, but have been allowed by owners to devolve into very bad neighborhoods.

Add to this the fact that many small business site owners know they have a problem, but really don’t understand which links are truly hurting or helping, and it is clear that there is still a lot of pain and irritation in store on both sides.

I suppose it is inevitable that there will be people who see the situation as an opportunity to score points. I just hope they are assessing requests on an individual basis at least.
- http://twitter.com/thogenhaven Thomas Høgenhaven
  
  Hi Sha,
  
  You are absolutely right. There are many cases where it’s absolutely
  legit to ask for a link removal. Especially when someone else placed the
  links – whether a bad consultant or someone out bowling.
  
  This case was a spam comment link on a porn site, pointing to an
  unrelated industry. And in such cases I can see the web owner’s point of
  view.
  
  And it’s definitely good to get tools for it. For the removal work
  needs to be done, no matter how many red flags the link builder should
  have seen.
  
  Thanks!
  
  Thomas
  
  - And thanks for the long thoughtful comment. I always feel bad when comments are longer and better than my post

In case you need me…

Thomas Høgenhaven: Online Marketing From A Research Perspective

The Poetic Justice Of Google Penguin