Google is Breaking the Internet
I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani: <a href="http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248" rel="nofollow">http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248</a> Skip to 4:15 in to listen to the discussion.<p>Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?"<p>Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up their links, a lot of them send out a bunch of link removal requests on their own prerogative.<p>Situation #2 is when Google actually sends a notice to a site for spamming links and gives a concrete link that we believe is part of the problem. For example, we might say "we believe site-a.com has a problem with spam or inorganic links. An example link is site-b.com/spammy-link.html."<p>The vast majority of the link removal requests that a typical site gets are for the first type, where a site got tagged for spamming links and now it's trying hard to clean up any links that could be considered spammy.<p>If you read the original post closely, it's clear that this is a site asking for a link to be removed--the quoted email isn't from Google.