Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by James Maabadi on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/10/2013).

Is Google Creating and Allowing Extortion?

Is Google Creating and Allowing Extortion?

Here is a response I received after requesting to remove 5, 000 backlinks. I would love to hear your thoughts.

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Hello James,
This is to confirm that blogfa. com abuse team has received your link removal request. It`s unfortunate that the link in some blog or blog posts under blogfa. com is being a concern. There are over 2 Million weblogs being managed and operated at Blogfa and that is making our site blogfa. com ranked no 140 high traffic website globally. This is one single most important reason that SEO companies are trying to use (or  let say abuse ) our blogging system to create blogs with relative contents and back link them to their customer sites, trying to elevate their customer`s search engine rankings. 

Blogfa. com abuse team is constantly monitoring and removing these blogs by automated systems, however not all blogs or links can be detected as spam link. In order for abuse team to verify and manually remove these links, there is a one time administration charge of $50.00 ( per weblog ) . To clarify that, If there are 200 links coming from a different posts from one weblog eg. myblog. blogfa. com , the charge is only $50. Please verify if you agree with this fee and we will send you the invoice. The links are being removed within 48 hours after the administration fee is received.

Regards,
Blogfa Abuse Team
abuse @ blogfa. com
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Justin Y: Didn't you post this in DSQ? I thought I saw it there. Anyhow, what a bunch of crooks. I'd just disavow them and move on. 
  • James Maabadi: The moderator (Jim) asked to repost it without the links. :) Defiantly don't want to promote these guys!

    I did use the disavow tool and 'reported' this domain, along with others, but it's been a few months and doesn't seemed to have changed anything. I really wish they would provide some sort of status or update with the tool, at the least remove the links I've disavowed from Webmaster Tools.

    I blame these links because I can't find any other reasons why the site has dropped from #2 to non-existent. It was #2 for years. As it dropped, these links started appearing in WMT.
  • James Maabadi: 'Allowing' might not be a good choice of words, but I do feel they have created a monster with 'bad' links. I really wish they just would count as nothing instead of negatively.
  • Justin Y: Hmm, I had one of my sites do the same after being in 1-3 spot for a year straight.  ;It's now back to page 2 after 4+ months of 10 pages deep or further.  ;I didn't do anything either to get it to come back. No disavow, no link removal requests, notta. lol
  • Justin Y: Yeh I hear you on that. Google has really screwed things up if you ask me. I think they've screwed up their algo so bad that they don't know what to do. ;

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/10/2013).

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