Link removal request email template – Penguin 2.0

After the new Penguin updates there were not few those who saw the amount of their websites’ visitors decreasing dramatically. Responsible for these downturns were mainly the low quality link building activities that some of us used to do during the past years. Examples of these activities include paid mentions, inserts in directories with little Page Authority etc.

At October 16th, 2012 Google introduced the Disavow link tool that enables online business owners and SEO companies to remove the spammy links and increase the rankings to the initial levels. Although this solution sounded to many as a Deus ex Machina, things are not as simple as they sound and this is something that Google mentions clearly on its Webmaster Tool guide.

“If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.”

To come to the point, before you ask Google to remove all of the low quality URLs from the web you have to first prove that you have tried to contact every person whose website is pointing towards yours. In order to do that a spreadsheet with some notes regarding the date of the communication and the reply that you received can be extremely helpful if not necessary. Following you will find the link removal request email template that we promised.

Hello,

My name is [Insert name] and I am responsible for the website [Insert URL].

The reason why I am contacting you is the content of the following link that points towards [Name of company]:

[Insert Link]

I would like to thank you very much for writing about our company but at the same time ask you to add a rel=”nofollow” attribute or eliminate the link.

I would also like to clarify that you are not the only person that we contact and we just want to make sure that our website’s reliability will not be decreased due to the new Penguin updates.

Please get in touch as soon as possible to confirm that you received the email and removed the link. The alternative solution for us would be to send a Disavow Link report to Google which is something that would also decrease your rankings.

Thank you for the understanding.

[Insert Signature]

We hope that this helped. Feel free to contact us for further information.