There is an interesting conversation going on at Hacker News on the topic of Google sending webmasters manual actions over links, which leads to those webmaster requesting and sometimes threatening webmasters to remove links from your quality site that you may have never added in the first place.

Heck, I get the requests here fairly often and honestly, I stopped responding.

Anyway, a lot of the topics we’ve covered here a bunch of times including:

Google: Being Disavowed Won’t Hurt Your Site
Do You Fear Google Disavow Link Threats?
Hold Your SEO Client Hostage With Negative SEO Threats
Time To Get Creative With Your Link Removal Requests

But there are some interesting notes in here from Google’s Matt Cutts and Google’s Ryan Moulton, outside of all the other interesting discussion around this topic. You should 100% read through the Hacker News thread yourself.

Matt Cutts:

So maybe if you get a lot of these requests, maybe, something is wrong with your site?

Matt Cutts responds next to the claims of negative SEO:

Ryan Moulton added the reason why so many link removal requests go out, is not just Google’s fault, but the bad SEO is fired and the new one isn’t sure which links are bad and good:

Of course, Matt mentions he also talked about this quickly on This Week in Google at 4 minutes and 15 seconds in, watch it:

Forum discussion at Hacker News.