Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Nowadays, with paid links in fashion, I am wondering about doing the analogous thing with payment. E-mailing a webmaster and offering $X to remove a link to a competitor. Has anyone tried this and had any success?
"Hey, I have a link to your site from my PR8 site. Pay me $XX by midnight or I take your link down."heh, you mean the link wasn't already being bought?
FWIW, businesses that are successful over the long term focus their resources on building their business, not destroying their competitor's business...
WBF
For years we have been asking other websites for links to our sites. Occasionally, we see good links to competitors and we e-mail the webmaster to suggest he or she remove those links. This sort of defensive links work was a small part of the overall effort, but I think it was worth doing.
This is the most destructive post I read here I think.
and I thought I was the ugly guy with ugly ideas :)
Never thought of such action, though.
so my turn now.
Hey OP!
If you have some spare cash get in touch with me. If you don't get in touch with me within the next 48 hours and send me some $ I will link to your competitors from my sites ;)
Anyway, why not to pay for links and rank higher or build another site and buy links to it so you get more spots?
One such option could be publish the request, sans any working link back to the suggester of course, along with the site's assurance it would never engage in such tomfoolery so others need not ask.
Perhaps send along a copy of the request to the site that was targeted as an FYI, noting the request was denied. The two parties can then address each other further in whatever manner they deem appropriate.
Karma - it makes the world go round
You couldn't be more right. Agreed totally. Right spot on!
If anyone asked or even worse offered to pay us to remove a link it would be blogged all over kingdom come.
If your niche is computer related, that has lots of web communities, then yes. The word would leak.
If it's not so computer related, then the current community probably wouldn't care.
But for the sake of argument, lets say the word got out, and the whole web community is in an uproar.
Sounds like the perfect plan for viral marketing, and natural link bait.
There's no such thing as bad press....
Instead of wasting your time in offering them money to link to your competitor better think of ways by which your site can get natural links to it :).
This method wont be sucessful as you wont know which of the links are already paid links by your competitor.
Then ask for ten more removal fees.
The joy of scamming a scammer, is that there's no conscience involved; it's exactly what you deserve.
Instead of wasting your time in offering them money to link to your competitor better think of ways by which your site can get natural links to it :).
Believe me, I would prefer to operate that way. I'm willing to compete on quality content and a couple years ago you could do so. But paid links are taking over the web. I wish the paid link industry did not exist. I wish link brokers would go get honest jobs. But competitors are using paid links. It's a reality. We can't just rely on quality content anymore. I wish that weren't so, but it is.
And defensive work in link development? I've been doing that for years. I've never paid anyone to remove a link, but I've suggested it, and many times my suggestion has been taken. The point of link development isn't to have a lot of quality links; it's to have more quality links than your competitors.
Yes, I am not comfortable with the possibility that webmasters might try to game the system by asking for money to keep out links, but that is a consequence of the unfortunate growth of the paid links industry. I just wish the search engines could figure out a way to not count paid links.
I've long accepted money for exclusive ads; but the basis has always been "I won't take money from other advertisers for the duration of this deal". I see nothing wrong in that; they pay a little extra, I decline other advertisers.
But the exclusivity applies with the ad - not linked to removing anything pre-existing on my site, and not affecting any links I may or may not choose to display for free. It works, because my ads are always clearly separate from the editorial content.
