This blog post puts forth a hypothetical situation in which a company buys links then later regrets it. What recourse would such a company have? Would it be possible to contact Google and ask forgiveness?
3 Comments
3 Comments
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Comments
Interesting idea. You are in a way challenging Google on their self touted altruism. They want to "do no evil" and one could postulate that taking your mea culpa and then still punishing you for it would be evil. However, at the end of the day the hypothetical company still broke their TOS and they are at will to do what they want. It would also send a message that they are serious about this whole "we will stomp out paid links thing."What is more troubling to me, and I’ve had this opinion for a while, is that the amount of organizations involved in the "link laundering" business is staggering. Everyone does it! All you have to do is get a proposal from one of the Link Exchanges and they’ll give you a testimonial list that is filled with some of the biggest names in the game. In a way, Google has to learn to sleep in the bed they made. Rather than destroying the livelihood of people who buy links to try to earn some money, why not spend resources and send the word out to the community to help them find out who is publishing paid links and just no follow them? The great thing about capitalism is that it is a self correcting system. If buying links didn’t work, people wouldn’t do it and the brokers woudl find something else to do.If I were you, I would turn this hypothetical company in. You could save yourself some face by just giving them the sites that put your links up rather than the full URLs with anchor text and all. Just give them everything before that first slash after the dot com. That way, you can squash all the links that those sites are pushing and still save face.Cheers,Justin Schmidt
No need to elevate anyone to Pantheon status. We’re just people :) Andrew, the reconsideration request form in Webmaster Tools, along with details you mention in your post, is the way to go. Be up-front and we’ll take a look.
Thanks, Brian. I was hoping you’d say that.