Decius wrote:
A corporation has been asking me to delete a blog post from MemeStreams. They claim that the post is an "unnatural or paid for" link to their site and that Google is penalizing their page rank as a result of the post. The post actually isn't "unnatural or paid for" and the evidence that Google is penalizing them for it, it turns out, is dubious at best. I informed them that the post in question is a legitimate post on a real person's blog, and therefore I cannot delete it. Their response:
I do agree that this is crazy but google is google, he have to play according to their rules. Unlinking will be much appreciated.
Update: The corporation that sent me the email above claims that the link in question was flagged as "unnatural or paid for" in a report that they received from a service called linkdetox.com. I contacted linkdetox and informed them about the false positive, and they responded that if I'd like to know why they are calling for the censorship of this website I will need to pay them:
Hello Tom,
Thank you for your message.
If you cannot get access to this information why this backlink was evaluated as harmful then i suggest you buy Link Detox and run a report on [ED: the corporation that sent me the original complaint] so you can see exactly what he see's this way you will be able to the information on why this link that is pointing to the website is harmful.
You can signup for a Link Detox here http://www.linkdetox.com/
Keep in mind that we use very common spam link rules to identify bad links, but can still be wrong in certain edge cases.
We always recommend to our clients to double check and/or manually review all links you'd like to disavow, because if you ignore good links, it might hurt your sites rankings.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best Regards...
Tangentially related: this reminds me of one of my first experiences with Farcebook. I received an update along the lines of "X has answered these questions about you in the Y app. Sign up for the Y app to see what they said!" Uh, yeah, no thanks.
