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| From: XXX <XXX@sportsdirect.com> | |
| To: YYY | |
| Subject: Karrimor Links | |
| Hello Fabien, | |
| My name is XXX and I am responsible for the website www.karrimor.co.uk. | |
| I am contacting you as the following link point towards the Karrimor website: | |
| http://blog.penso.info/2013/06/16/packing-for-a-6-months-trip/ | |
| I would first link to thank you for writing about Karrimor and we very much appreciate | |
| your loyalty to our company however, due to Googles strict guidelines may I please ask | |
| for you to make this link a nofollow? | |
| To manually change the link, you need to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> | |
| tag in your hyperlinks. | |
| Here is an example: | |
| <a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/”rel=”nofollow”>Your Website</a> | |
| The nofollow link will in no way affect your website, it simply tells Google not to | |
| pass PageRank. | |
| If you are unable to do this, may I regretfully ask for the link to be removed to | |
| ensure that our website is abiding by the rules set by Google. | |
| If you could please reply once you have rectified the link, that would be very | |
| much respected. | |
| Thank you for both your time and understanding, |
That kind of message tends to indicate that they are kind of desperate. They might have done some black-hat SEO and may indeed have been slapped by Google. In that situation what they are doing (contacting back-links owners to change/remove the links) is very common.
If they didn't buy the link you've put on your website, there is no reason for you to change it.
But, if you like the brand, you could help them by adding a rel="nofollow" to your link, and it won't hurt you. He's right about that.
I've noticed that one the link on their website is dead and redirects to the home page, so you could kill it.
You can also change the first link to "My main bag is a Karimor" and have the link on the whole phrase, to reduce the perceived anchor link optimisation.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en says there is 3 reasons to add a nofollow:
- Untrusted content
- Paid links
- Crawl prioritization
It doesn't go in any of them so I'm good I guess, but I'm trying to understand. I think @jlecour is right about the black hat SEO.
https://twitter.com/_julietelliott/status/535858744962596865 says I'm not the only one.
I don't understand !
I'm kind of interested in SEO and involved with a website that needs good SEO to live, and I've never heard of something like this.
If your website were of very poor quality/reputation, a link to his website might be a disservice, but then he could disavow it through Google Webmaster Tools.
I'd be extremely surprised if your website was considered "bad" by Google.
Also, you link anchor is the brand. What is wrong with that?
And if you don't want to remove/change your link, what could he do about that. Internet is a free place and you don't have to ask for permission to link to a publicly accessible content.