Q and A: How can I stop link farms from linking to us?

Dear Kalena...

I'm using Yahoo Site Explorer to check inlinks to client sites. On one site, I'm noticing inlinks from PR0 sites that are just listings of URLs and fake 'directories' that are there to pick up adsense dollars. They were not submitted by us or our client. My questions: Is there any way to remove your site from these types of pages? Do the owners ever honor any requests? Is there any way to minimize the impact of inlinks from sites like these?

Keri

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Keri

Thanks for the caffeine injection! Re your questions:

1) You can try. If you can find a way to contact them, ask them to remove the link. A good trick I learned is to look up the domain ownership details via a WhoIs lookup and cc your email to the admin, tech and registrant emails. That shows them that you are serious about your request and have done your research about them. Most likely they will ignore your request, but you never know.

2) I wouldn't worry too much. Google and other engines are good at filtering out links from low quality sites and any impact they have on your site's overall link popularity is minimal. However, if you find sites are duplicating chunks of your client's content using site scraping, that's considered an infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and you can report this to Google via this link.

Overall, I wouldn't spend too much time concerned about either issue. As Google say on their own Webmaster Blog:

"Don't fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it's highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site's presence in Google."

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