So you’ve done a sponsored post (and of course, used our blog post to work out how much to charge for it!) and have been paid for it – and that’s it, right? Transaction complete.
Not quite. Sometimes, the people who have paid for that link to be placed on your blog will decide that they would like the link removed for whatever reason (usually because they don’t want a demotion for a specific search term in Google) and will email you to ask you to remove that link. What’s the best way to deal with that request?
You can (of course) edit the post and remove the link – who cares, right, you’ve already been paid. Along the same lines, you could just ignore the email – it’s probably not going to harm you too much, so why bother?
Something that we’ve seen discussed this week on Twitter however which piqued our interest was the idea of charging to remove the link. Some people (and potential collaborators – everything you do online will influence someone’s decision to work with you in the future!) might think this is a bit greedy or cheeky – you want paying to insert and remove the link? – but a nominal amount may help to put off those who will keep pestering until you do what they want (especially if they are asking for a link to be removed that they didn’t pay for in the first place!). After all, you are still doing some work for their brand – just undoing what they wanted in the first place.
What do you think is the best way to deal with these requests? What would you do?
Interesting. I hadn’t heard of requesting payment for removing links, although I haven’t actually been asked to remove any. Would it not just be with really incongruous content, or some really obvious keywording?
Have a read of this about Google’s new Hummingbird update, I think you will find it interesting:
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/63614-has-hummingbird-changed-seo-forever?dm_i=LQI%2C1X3X4%2CBVPXVC%2C6W1EI%2C1&utm_campaign=3224344_932-daily-pulse-uk-2013-10-21&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Econsultancy
xox
This seems quite far fetched if you ask me. Getting paid for something is because you’re doing some work on it ie. taking time to pull together and draft a post, etc. but removing a link is quite the opposite – it requires no work and takes all of 2 seconds. To charge for removing links could potentially jeopardise a good relationship with a brand and may give you somewhat of an undesired reputation in the blogging community. For me, charging to remove a paid for link is a bit much.
I don’t know if I would charge to remove a link that I’d been paid to put there, but I think I would charge to remove a link I hadn’t been paid for. It’s still giving up your time to help out a company, and if you don’t value your time, who will? xx
Hey
The reason I usually because the company have been hit with a penalty and Google may have spotted ‘unnatural links’ and flagged yours up (google aren’t always right but it’s better to do as they say). So, from an SEO perspective, they have to contact site owners and ask for its removal. Pointless asking for payments, as it can be put in a disavow file and Google will ignore it anyway x