When Google rolled out it’s Penguin update to try to discourage sites from building links in an unnatural and spammy way Virante cheered. Virante’s CTO, Russ Jones, has long been a thorn in Matt Cutt’s side asking why spammy sites outrank real sites, usually with a dozen examples to go with his question.
With Penguin though, something changed. Google was not attempting to improve search results, they were only trying to clean up web spam. As websites started dropping in the search results they had to come to the realization that those links they built in 2009 in that directory we no longer just lame, they had become a problem.
Penguin is a good idea, but there was no way for a site owner to evaluate what links were helping them and which ones were hurting them. Virante’s phone started ringing off the hook. After about a week of talking to distraught businesses they decided to make a tool that could help any site owner feeling the effect of the Penguin update.
Remove’em is a professional link removal tool designed to help you check, evaluate and remove links that Google may deem suspicious.
There are 2 main parts of Remove’em that are revolutionary. First is the algorithm that can automatically white list the safe links and rank non-white listed links. Second is the contact database that is already filled with 8.4 million email addresses that can make contacting site owners a breeze.
If you want to give it a try, you can use the discount code gwc10 for 10% off.
Don’t you think you should use the tool before you recommend it, Phil?
A check of 1918.com shows:
We estimate about 458 links with suspicious anchor text ignoring 1452 safe links automatically. Some of these may need to be removed!
The addition of 8.4 million email addresses makes this look like a spam operation.
I did use it, and I’m clean. It doesn’t say that link X is 100% spam, it says that the following links are not 100% safe and leaves it up to you to decided. So my site has a lot of backlinks with my name as the anchor text, those are not 100% algorithmically safe, but I just unchecked the box because as a human I know they are safe.
I’m not at all sure why would having the contact information of site owners seem like a spam operation?
Aww come on Phil.
Over 8 million email addresses are being sold.
How many of these are from legitimate opt ins?
How many are illegally scraped?
I also think the program is being sold under false premises.
There is absolutely no proof that anchor text is the cause of the problems.
This is strictly a supposition.
It is more likely that the drops in SERPs are a recalculation of link influence with the non-relevant links removed from the equation.
This is a much more likely scenario.
“Aggressive” SEO has, in the past, included offpage link building and high PR pages, regardless of relevance, were preferred.
The new PageRank formula is relevance based.
Did you know that Google has turned off the anchor text function in a link?
They stated:
“Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename “PC”] This month (March) we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.”
While they do not specifically say, if we look at what the anchor text in a link does, as according to their original paper, the only real option is that anchor text does not “predict” the content of the linked page, as it always did.
This also fall in line with their objective to make organic linking truly organic. Without anchor text as an influence it removes the only component that can be gamed.
Best,
Reg
PS. I have an almost completed white paper on Panda, Penguin, Linking, Anchor Text.
Send me an email message if you want a preview.
Remove’em isn’t selling email addresses – if we have a record of the contact information for a specific site that you are need to contact, we surface it so that you can email them. There is no mass emailing going on, each site owner is emailed separately.
If you don’t think that backlinks are the problem, then don’t use the tool – but we have already seen it make an impact, so we feel pretty confident in it.
Just supplying a record of that many email addresses is an invitation to spammers.
And including them in the list, if they are obtained by harvesting is not legal. (According to the CAN-SPAM act).
Have you documented any of this “impact”?
Reg