Is Remove Em A Fantastic con?

[Steve25]

Hi,

Okay we were hit with a manual penalty on one of our phrases and I've been trying to get it sorted for some time. I came acrossRemove Em and did my research and thought it looked perfect for me.

When I check our site on there frontpage widget it said we had over 7000 bad links to be removed and over 40000 good ones.

However upon signing up for the service and paying my $250 the links it actually comes up with number 1105. So what has happened to the other 6000 all of a sudden?

I've sent my query into their help desk but it hasn't even been assigned to anyone and that was over 22 hours ago.

It is obvious that this is just another money-making con from an SEO agency and my money has been wasted.

Still at least I paid through PayPal so I can do a claim through them.

Has anyone else had any dealings with them?

Steve

[HiveDigitalInc]

Hi Steve,

I am Russ Jones, an active user here at SEOMoz and my company, Virante, owns Remove 'em. I would be happy to explain to you the issue you are discussing.

When you run the tool on the home page which makes an estimate on the number of links you have to remove, it is looking at the total number of links. This means that if you bought 1 sitewide link, and it was discovered by our predictor tool, it would count every link you found on the site.

However, when you run the real Remove'em tool, we find the unique linking domains specifically because you only need to contact the webmaster 1 time to get all the links removed. The sitewide link I mentioned above would only show up 1 time, rather than perhaps hundreds of time in the predictor.

We have had discussions internally about whether we should change the predictor tool to reflect unique linking domains, but unique linking domains reflects more on the number of webmasters you may need to contact and not necessarily the breadth of the penalty you face. We will certainly take this example into consideration in the future.

Thanks again for using Remove 'em!

[Steve25]

Hi,

Sorry but I feel that is rubbish.

On your site you state that your system uses data from a number of sources however that is not true. You state you use data from majesticseo, however to get at that data we have to pay majesticseo a fee. Something that is not mentioned on your site. We have checked ahrefs ourselves and your system does not include all those links.

In addition in your blurb you state:

Should I Remove All Links That Remove'em Shows Me?

Yes. All links that come back (after filtering for branded anchors) likely would not pass Google's stringent tests and are considered potentially harmful to your domain. These links should be (or attempted to be) removed before any reconsideration attempts.

However when you look into the links in more detail many of the links are excellent and should definitely not be removed. For example we had an article written about us on a leading fashion site. It is an excellent link and should not be removed.

Your system seems to go down the line of removing everything and I question whether this is just a means of scaring people into using your other services.

Steve

[HiveDigitalInc]

1. We do use data from Majestic SEO, but you do have to use Open Apps to accomplish it. Majestic SEO's account is free for sites you own. If our customers are unable to get Open Apps to work, we work with them to get those links included. Did you put in a support ticket regarding this issue?

2. We do absolutely use AHrefs and SEOMoz. If you feel that links have been missed, please let us know. We can certainly see if there are any bugs.

3. Regarding recommendations of links to remove, that is a fair question. Having personally guided innumerable companies through reconsideration requests, I can tell you the last thing you want to do is cycle after cycle of rejected reconsideration requests because you have not removed enough links. Remove'em has actually one of the lowest thresholds compared to our competitors because we primarily look at anchor text.  It is possible you are looking at the unfiltered list, but if that article does show up it is likely because the anchor text used in the link has high commercial value. It is our experience that these links need to be removed because Google will not give you the benefit of the doubt when you claim it is unnatural.

Perhaps most important, you have received a full refund for the purchase price of Remove 'em. If we were a scam, we wouldn't be willing to do that.

I am sorry that you won't be able to join the ranks of the over 1,000,000 links that have been removed via our service.

Thank you again for your time and good luck in your endeavors. At this point, out of respect for the SEOMoz community, I am no longer going to respond here regarding a product that is not SEOMoz's problem.

[Steve25]

Yes we did put a support request in but they did not answer it until we had posted on this forum. Which is disgusting that they ignore support requests after they have the money.

Then we get insults from them which I do not appreciate and do not expect from a supposedly trustworthy company.

Regarding the refund, we had to put a PayPal goods not as described request in, so we will never know if you would've refunded

Just looking at the anchor text is very short sighted as there are other factors which should also be considered (and that is from approximately half a dozen leading UK companies).

I simply do not believe that your product is good value for money and would not recommend it to anyone.