AirSafe Hitches Request to Censor Members

[Andy R]

I keep getting emails from AirSafe Hitches asking me to edit Redwood Owners links to their products. I have replied repeatedly trying to explain to them that we don't just edit our members posts on behalf of a vendor. The last time they emailed me I told them I would post publicly about their request unless they stopped emailing me. Unfortunately they have emailed again so I now I am posting it here for everyone to see:

We have discovered that some of the work done to promote our website airsafehitches.com in the past has involved questionable link acquisition techniques. It seems some links were placed purely for SEO purposes, with the intention of manipulating search rankings.

Some of these techniques may have been used to place links on your site.

Since these links could be seen as "unnatural" by search engines, we would be grateful if you could remove any links on your site that link to airsafehitches.com. Removing them will also ensure your site is safe from any suggestion of unnatural outbound linking.

So far as we are aware, there are (or have been) links at these URLs:
http://www.redwoodowners.com/forums/...read.php?t=204
http://www.redwoodowners.com/forums/...ead.php?p=5116
http://www.redwoodowners.com/forums/...ead.php?p=5071
http://www.redwoodowners.com/forums/...06&mode=linear
http://www.redwoodowners.com/forums/...e=hybrid&t=204
http://www.redwoodowners.com/forums/...read.php?t=204
http://redwoodowners.com/forums/showthread.php?t=204


We would be very grateful if you could help us with resolving this problem.

You can let us know once the links to airsafehitches.com have been removed by return email.

If you need more information or help to locate these links, please email me and I will be happy to assist.

The guy who is sending these emails and apparently not reading the responses is a guy named Lloyd Stegemann. If you happen to know him or communicate with AirSafe at some point please point them to this thread so they will actually read the emails I've sent them and review the discussions where genuine, valid & valuable links to their website were posted by our members and to stop spamming me asking to remove them. I've relied to their emails with an explanation in the past. It seems like they used sketchy SEO firms in the past and continue to outsource their attempted fix of the issue. If they would just stop paying these sketchy companies to quick fix their issues and handle them directly they would not be in the mess they are in trying to censor their own customers!

[Dave&Ginny]

We used to have problems on this forum with spam. Then in 2013, Redwood asked Bruce to start helping eliminate the spam by being a moderator. A short time later they asked me to help Bruce.

Some of this might still be from that time period when the spam flowed freely on the forum. It wasn't uncommon for us to remove 6 or 7 spam attacks each day. Most of them came from China or Russia .