Charge a fee for Removing Links

There are certainly businesses whose entire business model operates that way. I'm thinking specifically of the "Mug Shot" sites which put up people's police photos and information about their crimes and try to SEO their names so that the user will pay to have their entry removed from the site.

But that kind of thing really pisses me off. Whatever happened to ethical business practices?

So yeah, you could probably do it. Or you could just be a decent human being and remove the links without trying to blackmail them.

<sarcasm>How much to you think it's worth? $1, $10, $100 per link? How about a reverse auction or threaten to link to them on a porn site?
</sarcasm>
Just take them down, be a decent human.

How about not having a crappy website that people have to ask you to remove their links?

Do your part to be a better webmaster and make a site where people are BEGGING you to put their link up instead of taking it down. Lets make the internet a better place for everyone!

Seriously though you will eventually get reported to Google and they can take manual action against your site.

You can do that as there is no law that says you can't but it is Unethical as can be, IMHO !!

Just remove the links already, and build a solid business...

Charging people for this won't do you any good, they will report your site and your site will get deindexed...

Can you perhaps share the reason why they ask to delete the links?

Sounds like blackmail to me. Just take the links down. What you're asking to do is HIGHLY unethical and might even land you in legal trouble. Also, get enough complaints and your hosting company could decide to ax your website.

Why is this even a question???

It's a win win business for you. So it's all your choice to decide whether to or not to.

being in the directory business, this has been a topic that has come up a lot on our forums.some directory owners feel that they have a right to link to anything they wish that is legal. And if someone wants them to take the time to make and edit, they should be compensated for their time. there are others who you think it is ethical to help people when there is a request. Often they got caught in the middle of hiring an SEO firm that submitted to hundreds of directories. I think a directory owner who actually did quality editing has a good reason to charge for their time. But if it is a directory filled with lots of junk, it is pretty rude to charge for removal.

just remove the links without asking any money. yes, it'll not take much time and may be your site will get deindexed if they report it to google.

Ripoff Report is notorious for this and they have a terrible reputation. Anyone can go on and badmouth a company, but it costs the company $400 to reply or rebut it.

yes, & I have a customer right now that we are building a clone of Ripoff Report. Interestingly I ran into another developer friend and he is doing the exact same thing. I'm seeing there are some ways to not just build negative reports but also sell services related to security and usability testing. that said, ranking negative reports about a company can probably be a very lucrative venture.

I have a couple of sites that I don't really maintain any more. I had a plugin that would post stories that were distributed, at the owners request. At the bottom of the articles there was a link back to the company's website that had promoted the article. This was a win-win. I got content for my site and the other site got back links.

Fast Forward to a Google change where a site with a bunch of articles with links is supposedly hurting the linked sites ranking. I now have well over a 1000 articles and I get a request to go find 5 of them and remove the link. This takes either my time or the time of someone that works for me to go find those specific articles and delete them or remove the link. If they were sites that I was actively working on, it might be mutually beneficial, but they are barely a step above a parked domain for me.

These companies may or may not have paid to have the articles distributed, but at the very least voluntarily chose to have them sent out to websites. Why should it now come out of my pocket to go clean them up? I have a standard form letter that I send back that states that I did nothing wrong in having the links on my site and did so based on a decision they, or a SEO firm they hired, chose to do. If they want them removed they need to pay $50 to cover an hour of billable time. One firm actually offered this in their initial removal request. One other firm has paid it. Most just don't respond. I did have one threaten legal action because someone had done it as a "Negative" SEO effort against their company. When I responded letting them know where the articles came from and my disbelief that someone would go to the effort of writing full articles with their company information at the bottom just for negative SEO when that used to be a valid strategy for building links, I no longer heard from them either.

If you want to make good relationships with people that can help you out, do do stuff like that.

Time is money. If you get 100 requests a day to remove links, is it still ok to do it free?

You're running a business and they're requesting you to login, find the link and remove it. That's time you can't get back that could have been spent on other tasks. Charge accordingly. Chances are, they mass-submitted links with a cheap SEO service and now they're doing damage control, so the request is only benefiting them.

Would anyone here ask a lawyer to "send a quick letter" for free? No.

tell them to take their site off the net if they don't want people linking to it

wow

if it's on the net anyone can link to it

ANYONE

now that bs about panda and penguin

do not believe matt cutts

he's a liar

google delivers junk in serp's now

the reason

if you have high response content, they know people hit your site and stop searching

when people stop searching they don't sell clicks

all this bs about links and link value is matt cutts bs

links do not help seo that much

so they don't really hurt or help, unless you believe matt cutts bs

if you google matt cutts and moron

what do you see

that's how little google can control their own serp's