About Unnatural Links – If you need me to remove a link read this first

This is not a complaint or rant, but it’s the third time in the last 10 months that I receive an email from somebody asking me to remove a link from a post because their website has been penalized by Google for having “unnatural links,” and they’re trying to follow the recommended steps to recover their PR.

What are unnatural links? According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines,

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

Now, while I have run advertising on this site for a couple of years, I have never had paid guest posts, so as far as I remember I have never helped another site get better ranking results on Google.  Also, the pinging option is off, and WordPress automatically adds a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tags, I haven’t changed that setting.

Honestly, I would find it hilarious if some other site got better PR through my site, considering my PR is crap.  Anyway, If anyone finds that I have linked to their website(s) and thinks my site linking to them is potentially harmful to their PR, then use the contact form and let me know. Just make sure you provide me with the URL of the post(s) you want me to edit. The first person who contacted me about this asked me to remove “any and all instances linking to” their website without providing me the post URLs, which I found kind of rude, so please be specific.

If for some reason I haven’t removed your links after 3 days you can always try contacting me on Twitter @retrohellix. I get a lot of spam via email, so there’s always a chance your message simply went straight to the the spam folder and I just didn’t see it.