I awoke recently with an email in my inbox asking me for a link removal. Whilst no longer an SEO, I still have a lot of friends and interests in the field, including a couple of sites that are slightly dodgy, including a Bid Directory that was for a long time my biggest earner. It is woefully black hat, but meh. It is just there for the sake of being there. But rather than the link removal being requested for one of my dodgy sites, it was actually aimed at a site that had a pretty good link profile and editorially approved content (albeit dormant) – Blogging Dojo.
Here is the email in full.
Dear Sir / Mam
Our Website XXXXXX has a link from your website. We request you to remove that link at earliest because the backlink is hampering our website ranking and seo very badly.
Page where our link is placed:
XXXX
We also understand that your website integrity isn’t in question here but the penalty from google is severely affecting our business. The link has already had a very negative effect on our website SEO and business.
We believe that you would take action over it immediately or in case of no action within 24 hrs, we are going to have to file a “Disavow Link” report with Google. If we do this, it may affect your site’s Google rankings…
We would greatly appreciate your help with resolving this problem.
You can also let us know once the links have been removed by return email.
If you need any more information from us, please email me and I will be happy to assist.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you and do appreciate your help.
Thank you and Regards,
Joshua Bender
Interesting huh? There were a few things that irked me about this email.
We Are Not Saying Your Website is Crap But Your Website Is Crap
Lets start at the beginning, this doozy.
We also understand that your website integrity isn’t in question here….
Yes you are! The next line is this!
The link has already had a very negative effect on our website SEO and business.
So you admit to saying my website is crap, and that being linked to me is harming your business. Effectively with this line you are saying you don’t want to be linked with me? Okay, you’re saying my website, but as most bloggers put their blood, sweat & tears into blogs, it’s often difficult to say when a site ends and a person begins – case in point being The Wolf Within Me, which is written by Cass on her Lupus. By shitting over sites you’d be happy to be a part of mere months earlier, you don’t exactly endear yourself to the group that probably made your business in the first place.
Timescale
We believe that you would take action over it immediately or in case of no action within 24 hrs…..
SEO is a slow game, with work taking months to have any sort of effect, and as such by posting this timescale for link removal to us we’re stressed. I mean, why have you gone for this timescale? A self imposed deadline by the client? In which case it’s you who have screwed up by not managing client expectations well enough. Let me guess, the client bought on your “insta-SEO” packaged that “Guaranteed #1 Listings”, and this is it unraveling all around you.
The fact is, bloggers generally don’t operate on a 24 hour scale, but usually a few days or more. Take for example outreach, I know when I did it I’d often get replies a week or two later for some blogs. I try and operate on a 24 hour turnaround, but on occasions such as this I couldn’t (I headed out after work, and no I’m not sacrificing my personal life for free because you screwed up). And it had me stressed, largely because of my last point.
Outright Threatening of Bloggers
This was the kicker for me.
we are going to have to file a “Disavow Link” report with Google. If we do this, it may affect your site’s Google rankings
Sorry, but that is utter bullshit.
I just thought this left a sour taste in my mouth. There are ways to do things, and quite frankly, outright threatening people is probably not the way to do things. Even when I was at my most shadiest as an SEO, I treated the people I dealt with with respect, and even my competitors. After all, I was taught to treat SEO as a bit of a game (hell, you ‘game’ the search engine), and whilst I compete against fellow SEO’s, I treat them with respect.
By threatening me, you’re effectively saying that you are willing to sabotage me and my hobbies (or business) in order to get your business back on the straight & narrow, a path deviated from by yourself, not by me. To me, that is a monumentally dickish move.
I reached out to a few SEO’s following receiving the email (and me be absolutely fuming because of it), and Will O’Hara pointed me in the direction of this link – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604774?hl=en – which seemed to suggest that even if an SEO “Disavows” you, then by and large you are unlikely to yourself receive a penalty. That was the general consensus from the people I spoke to as well.
The Shape of Things To Come?
The inherent problem of disavow is that people take a chainsaw to a problem where a pair of scissors is probably all that’s needed. By removing links (which, in this occasion, was okay), you also remove the factor that ranked you in the first place. You’re going to have to get these links back in some way using natural methods. Those links are probably going to come from bloggers – if you threaten bloggers, they’re probably not going to link to you.
I’m just worried about what the average site owner is going to think. I mean, I’d like to think I have some SEO knowledge left in me, and I wasn’t sure the intricacies of Google’s wondeful disavow tool. Imagine what bloggers without the experience or connections that I have would do when they receive such an email?
I just think if you take the approach above, you’re biting on the hand that feeds you, and then shitting all over it. Not cool, folks.
That could be your wrestling move ‘ The Disavow ‘
Funny that, when I started, an idea I had for a character was “Samuel Emmanuel Orwell” (SEO) and as a good guy I’d have a white hat and a bad guy I’d have a black hat.
I then I realised that the crossover between wrestling fans & SEO’s who’d understand it would be me & Shane
no idea what an SEO is 🙂 but isn’t “dormant” crap in the world of the web? It was hardly an insult when you admit it yourself. Agree though that asking nicely would have worked much better. x
Gordon Campbell liked this on Facebook.
Sounds like the guy was a bit of a tool! He may as well threatened to ‘cut your heart out with a spoon’…yeah it sounds cool, but not technically possible! 🙂
Interesting read, makes absolutely no fucking sense to me but interesting never the less.
Chris Garrett liked this on Facebook.
That was a horrible e-mail and as you said, filled with mis-information. I wonder if mass spam messages like that are going to the be next big thing.
Lynda Royal liked this on Facebook.
I’ve had similar asking for blog comments to be deleted. Their company paid someone to spam my blog and now they are paying someone else to fix it and I am meant to ‘jump to it’ to help them? I asked for money. Haha!
I told Joshua Bender to F&*% ioff and get this… he was asking me to remove or update things in a members’s profile page. In other words links that an SEO company had put into my database. I have even gotten a second request from him as well. He didn’t reply to the first. Big surprise.
I got the same letter! From mr. bender. I forwarded it to the owner of the company, a real estate agent, because I don’t think she really would have allowed a person/company she hired to send this garbage.
Update! Just got a response from director of ops for that real estate firm i mentioned above, may want to reach out to the “real owners” of these companies to let them know what their 3rd parties could be doing to their reputation:
“Hi Sheila,
My name is XXXXXXXX , I am the director of operations with the XXXXXXXXX . We are very sorry about the email you received about removing our link from your site. This was done in error by a 3rd party vendor who was helping us clean up some old back links. We have since asked them to stop work on our site.
Thank you for giving us a heads up that you got this email, please let me know if you have any questions.
Yours to count on,
XXXXXXXXX”
I run a car enthusiast forum, and I’ve gotten emails from this same Jos/Joshua Bender regarding half a dozen companies. All are asking for the removal of links that were put into bogus user profiles created sometime in 2012. I reply to each and every one of those emails, and I have yet to receive a single reply.
I HAVE, however, taken to putting the links into my “signature” on the forum. Seeing as I am the most active member on said forum, and have been for over a decade, there are a good 50,000+ individual URLs in which these links are now appearing. I informed Mr Bender that I was going to begin doing that in one of my replies. Once added, I informed him that I would ONLY remove those links once he removed the links he placed on my site.
Rhys, Thank you so much for this. Had exactly the same email yesterday… dealt with it swiftly & snottily, remarking that his tone was aggressive. Glad to know I wasn’t alone in receiving this and he is clearly in need of a few ‘zen’ activities in his life! Cheers
I just received this IDENTICAL email for two of my websites (not blogs) complaining about (get this) the link that they themselves demanded be left on all the pages, as a requirement for using the (paid) template I used for my sites. I have just written to the company dreamtemplates to see if they did indeed send me this threat. If so, I would think it reflects on THEM more badly than my perfectly good, attractive websites. There is no spam on my sites, and nothing objectionable. I don’t intend to reformat thousands of pages just because they are having problems.