Tuesday 9 July 2013

Can you remove competitors links?


What would you say if your competitors could delete 39% of the backlinks that point to your website? Unfortunately, this seems to be possible and it is not too difficult. If you don't want to lose your rankings, you have to keep track of your backlinks.


A blogger i have been following found out that it was very easy to get backlinks removed. He sent a link removal messages from a newnGmail account stating that he was working on behalf of a client. The results were unbelievably bad:

4% of the recipients requested money to remove the link (between £2 and £2000).
4% asked for proof that the sender of the message was really working for the linked company.
39% of the recipients deleted the backlink to the website without further questions.
Remember that this was not a link removal message from an official company website. The link removal requests were sent from a Gmail address and the sender only claimed that he worked for the linked company.


The numbers above indicate that it is extremely easy to remove the backlinks of a website:
Get a free email address with a nice name, for example shoes.com-backlink@gmail.com.
Create a link removal message with an officially sounding text. Mention the words "Google", "penalty" and maybe "Matt Cutts".
Send this message to all websites that link to the website.
Just to be sure: do not do this! I just want to illustrate how easy it is to get backlinks removed.


It's sad that Google's Penguin update has resulted in a link removal craziness that makes the above scenario possible. If you want to get lasting results, you have to do the following:

We Use safe SEO methods that play by the rules. By using these methods, you make sure that your website gets high rankings that last.
Monitor your rankings and your backlinks to make sure that your competitors don't manipulate your rankings.