Google Penalty – Why removing links probably won’t help you

I get several emails everyday from people asking for links to be removed from YouReview because of a Google penalty. At first I dutifully responded to each email telling the person that removing the links will not help because I use the “nofollow” attribute on all my links. Now, I simply ignore them and am somewhat saddened by the lack of education about links and Google.

What is nofollow? Nofollow is a way to tell Google and other search engines that you do not want the link to count for search engine ranking purposes. For Google specifically, this means the link will not affect the PageRank of the site you are pointing to. Removing the link will not improve or hurt the ranking of the site the link was pointing to. Google simply ignores the link in it’s ranking algorithm.

As a web master, please check that the link you are asking to be removed does not have the “nofollow” attribute. If it does, please don’t bother the website owner as removing the link will not help you.

You can inspect the link using Google Chrome. Right click on the link and choose “inspect element”. You can then see the raw html and if the link has a rel=”nofollow” you don’t need to worry about the link.