How to easily remove a link in a comment on NashvilleGab

Hello and welcome to my little home on the web.

Have you come to NashvilleGab because you or someone working on your behalf placed spam comments somewhere on my little website here that Google is now penalizing you or the company you represent for?

Oh man, that really sucks for you.

Fortunately, we here at NashvilleGab understand your plight and wish to help you as much as possible in this attempt to wipe the web clean of your bad habits, because, you know, NashvilleGab cares about the little guy just trying to make a buck at the expense of our comments section.

Unfortunately for you, our time is precious and if you want the comment and/or link removed it will cost a removal fee of $10.

This $10 fee includes:

$5 for the time taken away from actual work.
$5 for various time-sucking (but fun) activities such as pointing and laughing, neener neenering, etc.

I'm sure you understand our need to charge for this newly-needed service.

If you'd like to follow through with removing the link, simply send $10 to my PayPal under Shannon@NashvilleGab.com and leave a comment on the payment stating what post the comment is listed on and what link you want removed and I will get right on that.

I've included a PayPal button to make things easier for you, because I'm all about making your life easier.

If you'd like to know why I've decided to charge a fee for link removal keep right on reading …

So here's the 4-1-1 on all of this.

Over the last few years, spam comments have become a real nuisance. I'm not exactly sure where the comments come from but it appears that companies hire companies whose only job is to hire people to go around and leave nonsensical comments on blogs such as mine that have a link to a company. I thought they were bots doing it but now I'm not so sure. More than likely there's some comment sweatshop over in a poor neighborhood in Bangladesh or something.

Over the years, I've done everything my blog platform will allow me to do to filter these comments out. I even went so far as to implement captchas and having people sign in with an email, which made actual real-life people with something worthwhile to say not want to comment because who wants to go through all of that just to leave a comment?

Even all of that didn't work and spam comments kept on coming, which leads me to believe that companies have real people doing their dirty work and not just computers. Unfortunately, short of going through and manually deleting each spam comment there's not much I can do. I hate it.

Now comes the superhero (at least in this instance) that is Google. Google has decided to take on these spammers and their ocean of unwanted comments. Forbes has a nice story about what Google is doing to rid the world of these locusts disguised as comments, but basically it appears that Google is beginning to penalize companies who use spam comments for SEO.

And it's awesome!

So what is happening now is all these companies who utilized the spam comments for their own gain are now in a panic and trying to get site owners such as myself to remove the links they placed, the links and comments I was trying to fight in the first place.

And you know what? It tickles me to no end.

I've gotten several emails over the last few days from companies asking me to please be kind and help them out by removing these comments. The latest email I got this morning said:

We are not claiming that your site is harming our site, however we are just being cautious in an attempt to ensure our site ____________________ complies with Google's guidelines for now and in the future.

I hope you understand as I appreciate you may have received hundreds of these types of emails. And because I know your time is precious I have a link to technique which helps remove all outgoing links on your site:

Oh gee thanks, you gave me a handy process I can use to go through and remove all the links that you and others like you placed on my site without permission.

I don't have time for that … unless, of course, you want to pay me for my time, then I've got all the time in the world.

So bam, $10 fee.

Screw them and their unwanted comments that are now hurting their company. I hope they have as much trouble removing the comments as I had attempting to keep them off my site in the first place.

Payback's a bitch, sucka.