I have been complaining of this problem for a few years now and it's getting worse. I now receive several new "link removal" requests per day (I receive many more repeats of old removal requests).

Yes, Google isn't sending these so you could argue that Google are not directly to blame.

But, the merchants in question who are sending them are doing so because Google has made them believe they are (or will be) subject to some penalty if these links are not cleaned up.

I run forums and all of our links are natural links. For the first year I would look at every link that was asking to be removed and found that, without a single exception, every link was created by a trusted person in the community helping to answer a question by someone else. Every link I checked was natural and high quality, none... literally none... were suspicious or spam.

It may be that these merchants did involve SEO crews who did create a lot of spam links, but those are not on our site.

What's more worrying is that merchants feel so overwhelmed (numerically there are a lot of links to deal with) and in such a state of panic about this (they fear a bad placement could have significant effect on their business) that now they're hiring people to clean up SEO mess, and those people create 4 problems:

1) They have no clue which links were the result of SEO, so they just request every link they can to be removed.

2) They send these removal requests from emails like someone@web-marketing-group.org.uk when the links point at www.watches2u.com so it is impossible to verify as a publisher that the person requesting link removal represents the merchant to be de-linked (and #1 means that they don't enter into dialog as they can't, they're sending tens of thousands of requests).

3) The removal notices seldom have enough info to be acted on. One forum I run has several million posts, and the removal request may simply be "You've linked to blah.com, please remove it". OK, more verbose and almost identical to the OP's example, but not a useful pointer to the page or comment that contained the link.

4) If, as a publisher, one fails to remove a link, then their automated removal request scripts will now spam the publisher routinely with the same request.

If you can finally get a conversation that says "Do you represent the merchant, have you got a full URL to where the link exists on our site, and are you sure this isn't a natural and good link?", then every merchant has so far agreed that the link should stay.

But... for all of that, the effect is very real for the publisher: We get spammed evermore, from unaccountable sources that we don't know has a link to the merchant, asking for links to be removed that are actually very good quality and with good context and content.

It's a mess. A mess for which the merchants may be to blame (for originally doing SEO, and now for handling removals so badly), but this mess is definitely due to Google creating the situation.

My policy now: I put link removal requests in my spam folder.

That is how I regard it, this is just a new type of spam that Google has created. We never engaged in SEO or supported anyone doing so, we took an aggressive stance against spam, but as we have content that links elsewhere we are being spammed constantly with these requests and we carry the burden of the problem.

PS: The example cited above was just the top one in my spam folder, the link can be found on this post in the form of an img tag: http://www.lfgss.com/thread17604-52.html#post2119173 , it's the photo of a watch posted on a horology thread within a cycling forum by a long-standing member of the community with high karma. The request for link removal did come from an @web-marketing-group.org.uk address. The request will be ignored. We don't do "nofollow", but it's irrelevant as that isn't valid on img tags.