Increasingly, some people are concerned about the links that I have placed in posts, and may request that these links be removed. However, I freely place ALL of my links (whether I receive payment or not – see the disclaimer), and will generally not accept requests to remove links. Why? Because the web is exactly that, that is its core function to link one site to another with relevance, authenticity and value to the reader. This is what I believe I have done.
However, a lot of webmasters have gone out of their way to create hundreds or thousands of spammy links to their sites, such tactics worked until recently updates by Google penalized such backlinks. Spammy links are links that are obviously junk: regurgitated paragraphs, snipped content, garbage blogs, spammy comments, directory spam, … and so on. So, if you have lots of spammy links, by all means, remove them.
But blog links, like the links in this blog, are not spammy. Obblogatory has never, and never will be, a link farm; nor will we create webspam. And I warn you: I’d urge any advertiser seeking to remove links to make sure that removal of links is actually in their interest, and in the interest of their website, because it’s quite easy to remove a whole five years of linking work, and then you will never get your ranking back, because you nixed the good links with the bad links.
In fact, it wouldn’t be too difficult to imagine a scenario where you nix entire backlogs of links to get rid of some spammy links, only to find out that, like the Greek Debt Debacle, the proportion of bad links to good links has actually grown, not shrunk. So be careful what you wish for. You may actually get it.