Asking Sites to Remove Links.. What should I say?

[Prime85]

After getting some guidance from you guys here on this forum i have decided to go through my WMT backlinks and contact all the sites that I think are spammy and are linking back to me....and I will ask them to remove my links from their sites...

Can you guys please provide some guidance as to what I should say in the letter (also, anything i should definitely not say)....

Thanks for the help...

[Prime85]

That's a great question and I really don't know the answer....

How would i find out?  My site is still indexed, its just ranking very poorly for the keywords that most of these links used as anchor text....

[ukbackup]

Have you been penalised? Or are you just no longer seeing the effects of the links that google has now devalued?

[applesofgold]

I agree that it is a different story if you have been penalized, but I would try to find out if that is the true reason as to why you have been penalized. It very well may be ... but what else have you been doing that may have caused the problem? Have you hired anyone to get you links recently?

[EGOL]

I didn't know that google was complaining about your links.

If you or someone you hired bought links, traded links or made arrangements to have links created for your site then you might try contacting those webmasters, tell them that google doesn't like the links and ask them to remove them.

Good luck.

[anthonydnelson]

Sounds like you got a penalty. In that case, you definitely want to make an effort to remove as many as possible. Document the effort you put into it. How many sites you contact for removal and how many links you have successfully removed.

This data will likely help when you file a reconsideration request.

The main problem is, spammy links are a lot harder to remove than they are to acquire. Best of luck.

[Prime85]

But my rankings have dropped terribly and i got a notice in my WMT that G detected an unnatural flow of links... and within a week i went from page 1 to page 10 on my main keyword... I think i need to try and remove some of those... Do you still think it's not necessary?

[applesofgold]

I agree with EGOL - it is not worth the resources to remove them and most likely they are not hurting your site.These types of links will become inevitable as your site grows.

[EGOL]

Lots of these types of links are simply part of the content on spammy websites.  They are often produced by a robot that scrapes websites and republishes snips of their content, including links.  The more popular your website becomes the more of these types of links you will acquire.  In some industries there are enormous numbers of spam websites.   My site has a million of these links and I am not going to do anything about it.  It would cost thousands of dollars in labor just to make "an attempt" at contacting these people and I bet that the response rate will be really really low.  Google knows that these sites are trash.  I don't think that those links are helping or hurting very much at all.