Remove My Link or Be Disavowed! – Fear Tactic Eliminated

I have already covered the seemingly aggressive stance that backlink removing services tend to take while trying to clean up a clients link profile and came into the story with the belief that the threats of action were often over inflated and resulted in the whole conception that you portray being seen as over the top and uncalled for but today I can expand on that a little more.

With the release of the Google Disavow tool, a reporting system that allowed you to ask Google to not consider the links or domains displayed within the file that you upload to be non-equity passing (no follow), there was a lot of uncertainty towards what it would actually do to the sites that were mentioned in your request.

Would it be the secret sauce for knocking competitors out of the index?

Would it derail a website as they start to gain traction?

Well it seems that one webmaster was so worried about the ‘threat' of finding their website placed onto the dreaded disavow list that they turned to the Google Webmaster Help forums for further insight, asking whether their site being placed onto the disavow list of another site would mean that Google then conceived the site to be "spammy".

Reaching out to the community, user Sky T revealed that he had received an email from a link removal company that contained the following message:

As you can see from the partial taken from the email outreach, the link remover tells the website owner that the inclusion of their site on their disavow list may "flag your site as spammy" or it could be thought to be in breach of the Google guidelines but finally Google have stepped up to the mark to debunk the misconception.

John Mueller commented on the thread, showing the stance that Google have on this sort of tactic and reassuring Sky T that their comments were "wrong".

In his response Mueller said:

So there you have it, if someone comes to you with the threat of adding your site to their disavow list you don't need to worry, it's not about to pull the rankings of your site out from under your feet.

That said, if you are linking to them in good faith then you have to wonder why you are doing that in the first place if they are willing to allow someone to conduct a service on their behalf with such aggressive tactics… I mean would it warrant another blogpost on your site?