Jon Cooper writes about an interesting negative SEO tactic: fake link removal requests. I have particular interest since I think I got one of these, recently.
As I emailed Jon:
“I recently got an email from someone supposedly asking for me to take down links to their company site. The weird thing is that the address was actually a company one. I wonder if it’s not some former angry employee? When I wrote back asking why I got no response.”
I’m having trouble finding it in Gmail but will update this post later (hopefully Sunday) with the email.
What’s the tactic?
Basically you’re adopting the MO of a phisher (bank impersonating website trying to steal financial info), but your goal is to persuade the people linking to competitors to drop the links. I can see this being used against very high-value links, but not as a standard tactic because it’s just too time and work-intensive when you could spend the time on building your own links.
