Can you imagine writing a story, linking that story to other relevant web sites and then years later being hit with a lawsuit over linking to a web site?
Well, that is what is starting to happen to some webmasters and publishers!
As you know, Google has been notifying webmasters for unnatural links pointing to their web sites. They stepped up those notifications drastically this year and has gone to greater lengths to penalize link networks and warn about gray links.
So SEOs and webmasters are less about link building these days and more about link clean up. We have articles on how to remove bad links and SEO tool providers building out spam detection tools, despite the controversy around them.
But despite many webmaster and SEO efforts, removing unwanted links to your site might never actually work enough to remove a Google penalty.
So some webmasters are taking extreme measures and threatening to sue publishers and webmasters who are linking to them. The topic of needing permission to link to web sites is not new, we actually covered it in 2008. But I have no doubt in my mind that the topic will come up extremely frequently now that links to your site can hurt the ranking of that site in Google.
Yea, you cannot control who links to you and Google knows that. But if you have bad links to your site and Google has penalized you for it, you might want to take extreme measures to encourage those linking to you to remove those links.
Would you sue or threaten to sue someone who is linking to you and refuses to remove the link?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Image credit to ShutterStock for prisoner
