Should I Pay For Link Removal?

[Matt_Wilson]

Hi,

I'm in the middle of a link removal campaign and getting a lot of replies from site owners asking for payment or directing me to a link which is effectively a payment page.

The way I see it is my client is paying me to do their SEO. I'd rather be spending my time and their money building quality links, therefore the link removal process is in my way and requests for payment an insult.

However, I am not without sympathy for site owners being expected to remove links free of charge. After all there's absolutely no incentive for them.

So far I've had a zero tolerance attitude towards this and refused to pay, but just wondered what everyone else's opinion was.

On the other hand, many site owners have been very helpful and removed the links at my request. Is it the right thing for me to remove these domains from my Disavow Links file?

I'm finding it to be a bit of a moral conundrum to be honest!

[anthonydnelson]

No, you do not have to pay for link removals. Document the request, note they asked for payment, and then disavow the site.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-link-payment-17387.html

[MarieHaynes]

I almost never pay for link removal.  John Mueller mentioned in a hangout that if you have a manual review then you can just make a note in your spreadsheet that the site owner asked for money and then just disavow that link.

However, if I have a site where I am really struggling to get links removed, I might recommend paying for a few to come down.  I don't like to pay more than $10 per link though.

[Chris661]

Paying for link removal is a conundrum since as you state the site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you. I have chosen to pay a couple that had been de-indexed from Google and even so, one did remove the links and the other has not.

As to your other question on removing sites from your disavow list that have been cooperative and removed the links, from what I have read there is no harm in disavowing them anyway. The risk is that some site owners may not have properly removed the link and it may come back. They may have temporarily redirected it to hide it or they don't know how to remove it possibly due to an older platform. I would be interested to hear from experts such as Marie on this point.

[MarieHaynes]

You're right.  There's no harm in including a file on your disavow even if they have removed your link.  However, if you think you could get a natural link from this site in the future you may want to take it off of your list.  (That's pretty uncommon though.)

There is a limit to the size of the disavow file (2 MB) but it's pretty hard to reach this limit.  If you had a file that was too big then you'd want to not include sites that had removed your link already.

[Matt_Wilson]

Anthony, Marie, Chris, thanks a million for your responses, all most helpful.

Chris, it's funny you should mention this: "...site owners probably feel violated and that you essentially got what was coming to you."

The most recent response I had from a site owner was exactly this. The email stated the link had not appeared there by chance, it had been placed free of charge by either my client, or someone acting on their behalf. Which is true, unfortunately.

Marie, the particular sites I'm dealing with at the moment I will never want links from in future

Thanks again for your responses, you've definitely answered my query.