Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I get emails every couple of days from different people requesting that I remove links to their website, so they can come in line with google's quality guidelines. One company even told me that they used to use cheap international spammers, and now they were trying to clean up those bad old spam links. I tried pointing out that this was an open forum and they were generally "good" (well in my eyes, or for forum members ) links. They didn't care, they just want all links removed, and threatened that if I didn't remove them, they would submit us to some google black list..

My answer to that is to replace every link to these companies with an "admin edit: XXXXX is a poor company, don't use them" in place of the link..

Googles quality guildines seem straight forward and I'm not sure how forum links on here made by members are a bad thing...



Anyone understand this?

I bet you could charge them to remove content.

I think you should publish their company names and what they wrote to you. Make sure to link back to their website ;-}

Hello.... spot the trouble maker....


This was the latest company today..

viewtopic.php?p=276643#p276643

I asked my sisters partner who works for Google about it, and he said it's coming more from Google not the companies themselves; they make the demands of the companies to comply. It relates to SEO, advertising and the like.

Basically, Google has algorithms that monitor websites and even though linking on a forum can be completely innocuous, it can still get classed as 'link farming' (as in the companies are link farming) to boost page rankings and therefore it's seen as something dodgy. Google demands that a company complies with their rules, and as a result they have to go through all of the links to their website and get rid of them, even the innocent ones on forums. If they don't comply then Google can ban them and undoing that can be really hard for a business. The fact one company that emailed you admitted to using spammers might indicate they have already been banned and are trying to rectify it.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... 6356?hl=en This website explains some of it, but doesn't really cover how innocent linking on forums and the like can be caught up in it.

As for the threats of BYAP being blacklisted, that sounds like a bit of an empty threat to me. More than likely it's they that are at risk of being banned with Google.

I know some forums that have banned linking altogether because it simplifies the issue. I think it's a shame to have to do it but it probably saves hassle in the long run. I don't think editing to say something bad about the company is the best idea though, it'd probably result in getting more people in a huff. It's not entirely the companies fault, Google can be a bit of a jerk with things like that.

Hope that makes some sort of sense.

Not sure how hard it is to edit the forum php code EB, but your php developer may be able to achieve something like the following without too much difficulty:

1) Create a new database table, lets say you call it 'banned_links'

2) Add all the websites you wish to remove from forum links eg site1.com, site2.com etc

3) On the php page which displays the forum posts, before rendering (displaying) the forum content, pass the content through a new function you write which searches the banned_links table, and if it finds any of those websites in the post, deletes the link (eg using this php function or similar http://au2.php.net/manual/en/function.stristr.php)

This would automate the task for you

You could simply add/remove websites to the banned_links table as you required

Then again this may be overkill for what you want to achieve

Could you perhaps add to your Terms of Use of this forum page, something which in effect covers your butt

If these companies have admitted to using spammers etc in the past I doubt they'd have a leg to stand on with google

EB you are not breaking any of those google rules, but as azira says i can see where a robot could think so and warn the destination site.


i have never heard of a google blacklist except for sites that are installing malware.

It's pretty much already been explained but basically every webmaster's worst nightmare is getting an email about unnatural links... basically it's google's way of telling you to find another job cause they're about to pull your revenue stream from under your nose.

In essence google want you to remove every unnatural link to your website... The catch is that 99.9% of all links are considered unnatural and they basically won't lift the penalty until you have no links left.

I think the threats of blacklisting are more that they'll email google saying you refused to remove the link. I could be wrong. If someone does ask you to remove a link, please do it, you're potentially toying with someone's livelyhood.

Anyone who has been blacklisted by google for using spammers, bots etc whilst the rest of us try improve our SEO and ranking with google legitimately is probably in the wrong industry to begin with and should consider an ethical, honest job in my opinion

In the past I have developed websites and commercial SEO work for businesses for 10 years, even developed and managed email mass marketing applications for clients (which are notorious for being blacklisted by ISP's etc), and never once had an issue or even a warning of being blacklisted.

The fact is you get blacklisted for being dodgy, very dodgy... most of google's terms of use are perfectly fair and reasonable



What are you talking about? Simply untrue. Even 10% 'unnatural links' would be an exageration, unless you deal in the dark side and employ spammers, bots, fake mirror sites, link farms etc in your line of work

I saw an article about this very thing today. http://timandjeni.com/blog/gordon-sands-threatens-seattle-bubble-google-disavow-comment-spam/

Interesting article. BTW If google thought Backyard Aquaponics had to much "user generated spam" they would contact the webmaster and let you know. The threat of a "google black list" is utter nonsense.

Thanks all, I feel a lot happier about just ignoring them now....

Interesting link smatthew

This comment hit the nail on the head:

"I love how comment spammers are suddenly worried about the spam they’ve left all over the place now that Google is punishing them for it"