We have discussed people charging fees to do link removals several times but Google's John Mueller said you shouldn't have to pay for your links to be removed - instead just use the disavow tool.
In a video hangout 56 minutes and 49 seconds in, John Mueller said you he personally wouldn't pay to have a link removed. Here is the transcript of that section provided by hiswebmarketing.
Question: Re: Link penalty – Should I pay webmasters demanding a fee for link removal?John Mueller: Personally I’d recommend not going down that route. If this is something that you want to have removed just for Google’s indexing and crawling then probably it’s ok to just list it in the disavow file. On the other hand, if it is something you want to have removed from the web completely and you don’t want to have this reference on the web for your website then maybe you can talk to those webmasters to see what you can do about having those things removed. But, essentially from our point of view when it comes to unnatural links to your website we want to see that you’ve taken significant steps to actually remove it from the web but if there are some links that you can’t remove yourself or there are some that require payment to be removed then having those in the disavow file is fine as well.
So there you have it, although Google wants you to work hard to remove bad links and not just use the disavow tool. Google does not want you to pay out of pocket to have those links removed.
Forum discussion at Threadwatch.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for mobster
