Link Building & Liability

[Agnafl]

Have an interesting situation here that I am dealing with and want to pick everyone's brain. I have been building links to my wife's website for several years now and have acquired quite a few. During that quest she was hanging her license with a local C21 office and I had several links with anchor text that mentioned her name along with the office name. For instance, "Jane Doe - Century 21 ***" and then a desciption. Some were just anchor text while others were contextual, etc.

This year she has left the C21 office and is with a different brokerage. I have removed every evidence of C21 from our website and as I find different forums or sites that I registered her on I have changed the profile to reflect the new brokerage. The C21 office has contacted me on more than one occasion now to have all the links removed that cause her to still rank for any searches with the C21 office name in it.

My question is this. Am I legally bound to have hundreds of links that are out there between directories, blog comments, forum posts, etc updated and or removed? Does my responsibility not end with my website or any other site that I have created or registered for? Or am I to assume that I have to call Google and say "Hey, can you take those links down for me. Especially those ones on pages that haven't been cached since February of this year." (sarcasm)

Curious about your thought......

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

I wouldnt worry about it. I would tell them to do better seo

[Scott.Hack]

Agnafl,

Not only would I NOT worry about changing any of the links, I'm not sure I would have messed with changing any of them.

Obviously fixing your site needs to be done, however, at the time that you were "advertising" that website and those links, the info was correct.

Think of it this way. If you ever did a phone book ad, do they want you to go out and collect all of the phone books too since they now have outdated info?

[Agnafl]

Think of it this way. If you ever did a phone book ad, do they want you to go out and collect all of the phone books too since they now have outdated info?

Very good analogy! Thanks and I agree with you 100%. Just wonder if there are any legal statutes that may bite me in the ass....

[Malok]

I think if you use Scott's analogy, that should get it through their thick skull.


Bottom line: you don't own Google. And YOU aren't advertising anything regarding C21. (The OTHER sites w/ links coming into yours may be - but they aren't your sites or under your control.)


Then I'd tell them that you have a complaint of your own to file with them - you don't rank #1 through #10 for all real estate searches in your area, and you want them to fix it - cause they own/control Google as much as you do, and when can you expect them to get that done for you?

[andywilliams38]

I don't think there will be any legal issues with that. Start building links for your new site and forget about the work done before.

[CLTMichael]

You should of had them linked to the keyword you want. =]

How can you be liable for what other websites have on their websites? Tell them to kiss off!

[andywilliams38]

I do agree with CLTMichael. It is time that you take care of your website now.

[Agnafl]

All of this is well and good and I agree with every thing that has been said here, BUT, when the complaints are filed with the real estate boards and the real estate commission it will get ugly and expensive. The real estate commission has already taken a look at some of the searches and are stating that we are falsely advertising for the sake of rankings. Both the boards and the commission are clueless when it comes to optimization and how it works. They see a search, they see results of the search, they see false advertisement. They see nothing else.....

[CLTMichael]

All of this is well and good and I agree with every thing that has been said here, BUT, when the complaints are filed with the real estate boards and the real estate commission it will get ugly and expensive. The real estate commission has already taken a look at some of the searches and are stating that we are falsely advertising for the sake of rankings. Both the boards and the commission are clueless when it comes to optimization and how it works. They see a search, they see results of the search, they see false advertisement. They see nothing else.....

And they are idiots!