Link Removal Request Tips for Webmasters & Business Owners

Why do people ask for links to be removed?

   The site owners who have received unnatural links warning from Google will send the link removal requests. The site receives a warning that it is penalized and will not perform well in search. To remove penalty, the site owners should remove all the unnatural links. Site owners also go for link removal requests so as to recover from penguin. If you send an email asking to remove the link it seems you are trying to get away from the manual linking penalty.

   Most of them think that unnatural links will be on spam and low quality sites. The sites which have done a lot of reciprocal linking and used number of advertorial links got unnatural links penalties.

Why would you ask for a totally natural link to be removed?

   Some of them will ask for the link to be removed even though it is a natural link. You may receive email request for the natural link to be removed for various reasons. In most of the cases the person who asks for the link to be removed is not the one who got the links to be penalized. The site owners are appointing the persons who are experienced in SEO to work on the unnatural link penalties.

   When you analyze your link profile, it is difficult to examine whether a link is natural or not. If you are not confident about the link then you would ask for the link to be removed. The process of removing penalty of a site which has high number of links either from links or resource pages of other site is the linking scheme. Many of the links may be reciprocal links and also paid. You can mark these types of links as "resource page" link while analyzing your link profile and some of the resource pages links are natural.

   One of the reasons to get natural link removal request is if you use an automated tool to remove the penalty. Some of the tools can mark a link as unnatural if it is from low page rank sites and also contains keyword as anchor text. But all the sites which have low page rank are not spam. These are the reasons for natural links to get a link removal request by mistake.

How should webmasters respond to link removal requests?

   When you send emails asking for links to be removed you need to be polite. You may also receive some nasty responses from the site owners. One of the response from them would be that link from their site is not unnatural. Some of them respond as "you only made the links and why should I remove them?" If you think that the link is natural and should not be removed then the site owners should email "This link is the one that was not created by an SEO. I liked your site and wanted to link to it. Do you still want to remove it?" This would be helpful to keep good link.

Some tips for business owners sending link removal emails:

   When you send emails for link removal request you need to follow few things which can increase the chance of getting your link removed.

Be Polite:

   If site owner feels that your emails are threatening then they refuse to remove your link. So, be polite while sending link removal requests.

Explaining that the linking site is not at fault:
   You can include the line in the emails as "Please know that your site's integrity and business practices are not in question here". By this you can let the owner know that you are not criticizing them for client's unnatural links problem.

Where possible include a link to the page that contains your links:
   You can include the link to the page containing your links in each mail but your time burden increases if you have large number of sites to contact. So you can give link wherever possible or cut and paste or bcc to the list of webmasters. You can improve the chances of getting your link removed if you give the link where it is in the site. You can also ask the webmaster to mail if they need entire list of links so that all those links can be removed if you include full list of links.

Don't spam the site owners with crazy number of emails:
   If you send emails to the site owners a number of times your email address may be spammed. If you didn't get response you can send email to an alternate email id or submit the contact form from the site.