I've received a fair number of these, dating back to late last year and continuing to this day. I'm not sure when Panda came in, but I wouldn't say they've increased or decreased since they started.
The sites I run are all based around user generated content, and the links are all genuine instances of people sharing information and linking in the process. None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.
We think the link removal requests are dodgy.
Suspicion is that by and large the requests do not come from the companies actually associated with the linked site. And that when challenged those senders of the request have then squirmed, apologised and claimed the request was sent by accident.
Basically: I believe that a fair number of these requests are from SEO companies attempting to get competitor sites a lower pagerank so that their properties fare better.
Only a minority of requests seem to come from the companies linked, and in part I wonder whether other SEOs are cargo-culting the phenomena by copying it without understanding it.
I forwarded an example to Matt Cutts a while ago thinking that this whole area feels spammy and dodgy, but I understand he's busy and must get a lot of mail.
I've not removed a single link as a result of these bizarre notices.
"I forwarded an example to Matt Cutts a while ago thinking that this whole area feels spammy and dodgy, but I understand he's busy and must get a lot of mail."
The question is why is there only "Matt Cutts"?
Google could have teams of "Matt Cutts" that are accessible and approachable.
Noting that in the traditional legacy business world (that everyone complains about all the time as the "old" way and needing "disruption") there are usually people that you can complain to about your problem and even an escalation procedure as well as monitoring at the company to make sure the right thing is happening with all the feedback.
There's actually a lot of Google employees who post around the web, take feedback and get it to the right teams at Google, etc. I'm just one of the more well-known people.
If the question is "Why doesn't Google have someone I can talk to about my issue?" then I think the answer is probably related to the scale of the web. Remember that Google gets billions of searches a day. There's also ~250M domains on the web. Even if we shifted every single Google employee to user or webmaster support, I'm not sure we could talk to everybody. That's why we look for scalable methods of communication, e.g. our webmaster console or webmaster videos.
Note that we have gotten better over time though. AdWords has phone support now, for example. And just yesterday we started sending example URLs when we send our messages about manual webspam actions. That helps because now webmasters have a better idea about where to look to solve their issues.
"There's actually a lot of Google employees who post around the web"
The overwhelming amount of people that would need help don't see or know who these people are.
I don't even know who these people are and I've been on the web since before there was a google. I know your name because I've seen it so many times in and around the "domain" business.
"then I think the answer is probably related to the scale of the web. Remember that Google gets billions of searches a day. There's also ~250M domains on the web."
Hence the problem. Google has tremendous power and is extremely profitable but isn't able to take care of all the people that it serves or touches. As a result people frequently feel they have gotten, for lack of a better way to put it "the shaft".
"That's why we look for scalable methods of communication, e.g. our webmaster console or webmaster videos."
One of those "scalable" methods has to be the ecosystem that serves the same function as the ecosystem surrounding Microsoft. The ubiquitous "tech guy" who you pay to figure it all out. Adwords is a good example. Easier to pay someone to do that that knows the lay of the land than to watch and learn yourself using the mass of info you need to know to do ad buys the right way.
AdWords is a bad example, its probably the most straight forward product Google offers, likely because its purpose & functionanlity is discussed in detail by Google.
That's completely unrealistic, we've been on one of the main forums for SEO for the last 2 weeks - there are a few decent ones at most (not 250M) - YELLING out that we need real help, and real communication. The have SCALED that communication down for you by front paging it.
There are, at most, a few places like this on the web you could easily focus on.
Bonus: I've written to you 4 times, tried google+, twitter, the lot. Poke poke poke.
I'm armed with a comprehensive set of example data, and have 30 years of programming experience behind me. I've been doing this with a bunch of whitehat webmasters who have a combined audience of about 10 million people a day. We have received absolutely no indication that you have even seen anything we've posted or written, or asked about.
Seriously Matt, you're not exactly reaching out.
Frank.
> None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.
The people sending out the e-mails don't necessarily know that though. Google won't tell sites which links are triggering penalties against them for obvious reasons, and there are a lot of spammy sites posing as user-generated content, far too many to manually review all the backlinks.
Worse, many of those sites aren't attempts at blackhat SEO for the pages they link but are actually trying to rank for particular terms themselves, but as far as I can tell Google doesn't make that distinction - if you're linked from a whole bunch of spammy sites you will now be penalized.
Would've been from david@ buro9.com which is a Google Apps domain.
I tend to permanently delete spam, phishing and related dodgy stuff once I've dealt with them in some way. It is just luck that I still had that one I stuck on pastebin as it took some searching to find one that I hadn't nuked.
I'm fairly sure that pastebin is one of the couple I forwarded to you (kept the original in case you wanted the headers), and I believe your email is just matt.cutts@
Edit: Just delving into my inbox, here's another from September 2012. http://pastebin.com/8N3XhLVN . I don't have too many as I am thorough in my deletions, tend to receive at a rate of one or two per week since late Summer last year.
I haven't kept track of Panda as I don't really bother with SEO/SEM beyond making content readable, but a quick search says those updates were March/April this year? Hence my point that these take-downs precede that, and given what appears to be false representation that I believe these people are using FUD to harm competitors.
The sites I run are all based around user generated content, and the links are all genuine instances of people sharing information and linking in the process. None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.
We think the link removal requests are dodgy.
Suspicion is that by and large the requests do not come from the companies actually associated with the linked site. And that when challenged those senders of the request have then squirmed, apologised and claimed the request was sent by accident.
Example: http://pastebin.com/P9tsWL0x
Basically: I believe that a fair number of these requests are from SEO companies attempting to get competitor sites a lower pagerank so that their properties fare better.
Only a minority of requests seem to come from the companies linked, and in part I wonder whether other SEOs are cargo-culting the phenomena by copying it without understanding it.
I forwarded an example to Matt Cutts a while ago thinking that this whole area feels spammy and dodgy, but I understand he's busy and must get a lot of mail.
I've not removed a single link as a result of these bizarre notices.