Ok, I’ve got a hypothetical situation that I need some additional thoughts on. Let’s say that I (hypothetically) worked for a company that decided in its infinite hypothetical wisdom that buying links would be a good way to achieve rankings for certain key terms. So, this link-buying company hypothetically signs a hypothetical contract with another company for something in the order of 1,500 links from blogs over a period of a few months.

So, a month or two passes, and my hypothetical link-buying company notices that not only has its rankings not improved, but they appear to have slid quite a bit. Also hypothetically distressing is the fact that most of the blog links are extremely worthless from a word of mouth perspective (but I suppose that’s what you get for hypothetically buying links).

Present day. Company (or at least hypothetical members of the company) have decided buying links from a blog spam farm was a bad idea (and some of them may have known from the beginning). They fear that Google has penalized them for such low quality links, but at the very least, they want the links that are already out there scrubbed clean from Google’s index. The hypothetical link seller company is suddenly and inexplicably not returning phone calls *gasp*, and I can’t contact each blog individually since it’s a very long list and they probably wouldn’t care. As was so eloquently put on News Radio, getting something off of the internet is like getting pee out of a pool.

So what does the company I hypothetically work for do?

One notion I was hypothetically batting around with some of my fellow colleagues was to contact Google through the Webmaster Tools’ contact form. We could tell Google that we bought a bunch of links, realized it was a dumb idea, but now we can’t undo it. We could ask Google if they will remove any of those links from affecting our site if we send them a full and complete list of the links we purchased. The benefit for Google is that they have some evidence of blogs which are simply spam.

Would this work or should my hypothetical company try something else? Hypothetically, of course.