Any successes getting SEO/link vendors clean up Penguin-related problems they helped create?

[MattBarker]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone's been able to get link vendors help clean up Penguin-related problems that they helped create?

I have a client who was sold years and years of AWFUL link building work from a major and prominent SEO vendor, that we are now battling to de-toxify.

There are no legal grounds for us as the ToS was watertight and the client is ultimately responsible (if naive), but has anyone been successful in getting vendors to cooperate with cleanups on ethical grounds? What's the best way to play that with a major vendor, I'm assuming they wouldn't want to be outed.

Cheers all,

Matt

[EGOL]

• goes for popcorn and a $10 slurpie *

This is a really interesting question.

[JamesNorquay]

Depends how "well known" the agency is, I have taken one 2 clients from a local agency which is quite large they have about 40 staff locally. We asked them to remove a large number of links from their link networks and directories they own. They actually removed most of the links in question over a few weeks periods.

The process we used was to have the client contact the agency direct with some wording such as "We realized you have been using link networks to do link building (see attached report of network links) this has resulted in a serious drop in revenue and traffic. We request that you remove the attached links in the report from your network."

This worked with two prior clients, they did clean up most of the damage, but that been said some other SEO companies would not do the same.

[gfiedel]

I made a request for assistance in getting links that I feel weren't procured in our best interest or within Google's current guidelines. Our vendor offered to use the disavow tool on my behalf saying that was the quickest way, but from everything I've read, this was premature and could due potentially do more harm than good.  I turned down their offer. I didn't want to perpetuate their lack of good sense and expertise by continuing to depend on them.

[jesse-landry]

I have experience attempting to do exactly what you are talking about here with very little result. My company used to buy links from "SubmitEdge" and their link building practices are shady at best. Thousands of terribly written articles, directory submissions, message board comments, and other ridiculous penguin-tastic links built through them.

I spent a good month or two working at getting them to help me in the removal of these links. They pretty much did nothing but inform me that their practices are well-established and in-line with Google's policies.. (untrue. incredibly untrue.) So what I started doing was asking for logins and passwords of the accounts created to go onto ridiculous message boards and post terrible links. The beautiful thing is they were able to give me lists of everywhere they built a link. And for the articles, they supplied me with usernames and passwords. This meant several weeks worth of work for me to go through each one and remove the articles and links.

However I was left with all the social links and directory links. Some of the article links also did not allow me to login and upon further review the blog sites owned by Submit Edge were the ones I couldn't log in to. I went back and forth with them and they eventually stopped responding to me and would not help me log in to those. They still exist to this day... I've yet to disavow because I haven't seen results of any penalties but I have this all documented of course.

Anyway I digress... The point is, you can battle all you want and it might get you a little further but ultimately they are going to do very little and claim they have done nothing wrong the entire time. (This is my experience with only one company of course.) It is frustrating to say the least. Especially when I know they could just ask their staff member what "djnaro23" password is so I could go through forumland and remove all the stupid links. But no..

One more note -- I ended up trying to guess a lot of these passwords for the aforementioned social links I was unsuccessful with. I will say that they are incredibly lazy people and several of the logins ended up being simple passwords. I literally copied the username and used it as the password and this worked about 33% of the time.

In summation, good friggin luck getting them to do any work for you; they will most likely refer you to their paid link-removal service which is a huge scam. However you should be able to garner a bit of information and hopefully some logins which will give you the ability to go back and remove them yourself. Or at least, as in my experience, remove SOME of them...

Fun, huh?

[jesse-landry]

Where do you get a $10 slurpee?! That thing must be gigantic.

[EGOL]

You take a bucket into 7-eleven.

I am going to need a $10 slurpee before this discussion is over.

[gfiedel]

I just want the popcorn. I will donate the slurpee to whoever wants it.

[jesse-landry]

just don't get confused and bring the popcorn bucket in there. I feel like slurpee mixed with popcorn would not taste as good as it sounds.

[KeriMorgret]

And now we know that EGOL does not live in NYC, because the major there wouldn't allow you to get serving sizes that big.

Might be time to invest in a slurpee machine!

[MattBarker]

Some good responses there, thanks everyone.