Yesterday I received an email from a company that is becoming rather common since Google unleashed their revolutionary updates last year, the email was asking me to remove some links from my blog that were directing to their website.

The links were left in the comments section of a number of my articles by someone who they hired (in other words PAID) to build links on blogs. Basically they hired someone to spam my blog with links and now want me to remove them for free.

This company posted 100s of links on my blog over the course of a year and now they wanted me to remove them for free. As you can imagine this would result in me having to remove the links one by one and would take a considerable amount of time. So I emailed the company and told them that I would happily remove the links but as there were so many of them I would need to charge as it would take up a good number of hours of my time.

Their reply was to become FURIOUS at the nerve of me to dare to charge them to remove 100s of links that THEY had paid someone to post. They said that they would report me to Google and that my blog would die as a result of this.

This is rubbish of course, Google has no control over my blog, all Google can do to my blog is ignore their links on my blog and not count them. So I emailed them back and told them to go ahead and report me and wished them well in their future endeavours.

I used to remove links for free until a very wise blogger called John Chow said to me “they PAID someone to put them in this mess, why should you fix it for FREE?”