Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?
-
My plan is to put all the root domains into http://netpeak.net/software/netpeak-checker/ check for PR main, status code, index, PA and DA. Then put them into Buzzstream which should go out and find the info for you. Then grab all the links from each spammy domain and provide them in the email to the webmaster to make them easier to remove. Hopefully this will make it a little more efficient.
-
I'm just using the free bit myself.
Its pretty new, but seems to work well enough. It may well pull some wrong info (or maybe pulls the info it gets to first)
- for the PR, does it always show the home page PR? Or does it calculate the PR for other pages by subtracting 1 for every click from the home page? I mainly ask so I can respond to client questions if they ever see the tool.
I doubt its that clever, its just aggregating data
S
-
Thanks for sharing this tool Stephen. I watched the video but the site does not share any info about the mechanics of the tool. Some questions:
-
how is the contact info pulled? I am wondering if it sometimes misses info or pulls the wrong info
-
for the PR, does it always show the home page PR? Or does it calculate the PR for other pages by subtracting 1 for every click from the home page? I mainly ask so I can respond to client questions if they ever see the tool.
-
any idea of what Agency pricing is?
I am just asking in case you happen to know some of this info. Otherwise I will reach out to the author.
Thanks again Stephen!
-
-
I've been using http://www.outreachr.com/bulk-domain-checker/ to pull data out of batches of urls for this. It goes and grabs link data from SEOmoz and then has a go at getting contact details including twitter etc
(Hope I don't kill his server while hes on holiday by posting this here)
-
Yes.
In the first case I shared, the client actually performed all the website contacts. I offered guidance on what was required and the client ran with it.
If my team was going to perform the work, I would request a mailbox be set up on the client's domain which we could use for this process.
-
Ryan are you using the client's email address? Seems it may get a better response rate
-
I wouldn't bother doing anything based on PR, would chase all backlinks that may appear in-organic.
-
We are left working with educated guesses. I would recommend a cleanup of spammy links for any client. If the client is currently not penalized, my judgment would focus only on sites listed in WMT which also have over 100 links pointing to the site.
Once the links have been cleaned up, I would check all client sites again after 30 days. Any client who exceeds 90% spam links clearly required further effort. No one knows where the threshold lies, but it's a pretty good guess that if 90% of your links are spammy you are not in a good place.
-
Thanks Ryan you've given me a lot to work with. Hell if I get good at this I might just create a whole new service for my agency lol.
Oh one more question and then I'll leave you alone. What about sites that haven't been hit yet, but have used similar tactics? Would you start this process for them? Or cross fingers?
-
Your process seems sound. A bit of additional feedback:
-
I would complete a Reconsideration Request but then proceed without delay to removing the links. You know the site has spammy links and should be removed.
-
I have no familiarity with Netpeak Checker but I'll take a look at the tool. Otherwise I cannot comment on it.
-
The "resubmit to Google" is not necessary. If they confirm the site has been manually penalized, they are seeking for you to remove all the spammy links. I have talked with others in this situation and Google is quite firm on their desire for you to address 100% of the problem. I would not bother submitting another Reconsideration Request until you have either removed all the manipulative links, or can show solid documentation of your efforts to do so.
Good Luck.
-
-
Yeah this all came right around "Penguin" so I'm fairly certain it's related. They do have a lot of exact anchor text too, but for a wide variety of terms. They were also using blog networks, and have spammy links, so it's really hard to pinpoint which of these or if all of them are the problem.
At any rate should this be my process?
- Resubmit to Google
- See if they answer back and with what
- If no answer proceed with removal
- Get links from webmaster tools
- Parse out Root linking Domains
- Run through Netpeak Checker (awesome tool if you haven't used it) finds PR, SEOmoz stats, Google index, status code, etc.
- First remove all PR 0 and live pages
- Resubmit to Google
- Second remove all deindexed PR 0
- Resubmit to Google
- Get other link source data (Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer)
- Remove PR 0 links
- Resubmit to Google
Hopefully that will do it. What do you think of this process? Oh and Thank you very much for your help You're awesome.
-
You can complete a Reconsideration Request. In the initial case, Google confirmed there was manual action taken. After the 100+ duplicate sites were taken down, Google then confirmed the remaining issue was due to the manipulative links.
With the recent Penguin update, Google may have automated part of this process into their algorithm.
-
Wow! I just have to give an expanded thanks (we don't have much room in the Endorsement area) for this detailed response. It's great to get some solid information about what it took to get a partial lifting of this penalty. It's certainly one I'll be sending other people to as an example of what to do.
-
**So Ryan in your opinion if they saw some major drops in rankings you would think it would be a safe bet that the site was penalized? **
Not necessarily. There are numerous issues which can cause ranking changes. A page could accidentally be blocked via "noindex" or robots.txt.
Diagnoses of a problem normally requires the highest level of skill. When you go to see a doctor with a problem and he or she can't figure out the cause of the problem, you are stuck....until another doctor comes up with the correct diagnosis. The pharmacy has all the right meds, but a diagnosis is required. The same holds true for SEO. When your business or health is on the line, you don't want to play guessing games.
-
In my opinion, whether Google chooses to index a page or not is not a consideration. You should remove all spammy links. Google could choose to reindex the page at any time and either way, they can still see the page with your link on it.
If anyone else has any solid information on this topic I would love to hear it. Otherwise I vote to play it safe, especially in a penalty situation.
-
Got another question for you. Do we even bother trying to get links from deindexed sites taken off or do you think Google takes those into account with the penalty?
-
So Ryan in your opinion if they saw some major drops in rankings you would think it would be a safe bet that the site was penalized?
They were also using Blog networks that got shut down, so those links have obviously been deindexed and therefore have no value which would drop the rankings anyway. That's the tricky part is the drop in rankings because the blog networks are gone or they are penalized.
-
Hi Ryan,
Great information.
We have had a tug of war with our SEO company who has built "unatural links". They claim it is impossible to do the job.
I wonder if you can explain your line ...if you build links on disposable sites which are not monitored, you clearly wont find help having them removed) and how the links were built." so that I can access how possible it is to get our bad links removed.
-
Thanks for the feedback Robert.
The main site to which I refer had a manual action placed in November 2011. Looking back, I would say it is was a prelude to Penguin. This site exceeded 99% of the links being manipulative so it is pretty clear any reasonable threshold would have been triggered.
What surprised me was how determined Google was about all the links being removed, and the level of documentation required. It is possible I simply received a hard-nosed Google employee but I really trust Google's manual team has a high degree of manual calibration in these cases. I think back to the leaked Google Panda notes and the tests to become a Google tester. They are extremely calibration focused. That's my two cents. It's just speculation but that would be my best guess.
-
Ryan,
This is impressive from the effort point of view alone; what sets it apart is your understanding of the need for documentation if you were to achieve success. So many sites had "SEO" firms do poor linking in the past and there was money to be made by just linking your junk to others. Unfortunately, many of these people went away or are of the type who would never take the time or energy to respond.
It would be interesting to know at what percentage of removal the Manual overseer will deem the site to be sufficiently rehabilitated on two levels:-
The first being the obvious that if a site can rehab to 35% for example the likelihood is google will lift the manual action.
-
The second being that, even at the example percentage of 35%, is it fair to the sites that did not go down that road that the "rehabilitated" site still has 65% of the inorganic links?
A question arises as to what caused the manual action?
Is the action taken as the result of some fixed ratio of organic to inorganic links?
Or, is it at least a varying percentage based on a given industry?
My guess is it is subjective on the part of those attempting to manually validate a huge piece of real estate.
Thanks for the excellent detail, you are truly a champ.
Robert
-
-
Wow great info Ryan. Is there a way to know for sure that a website has been penalized by Google and if this process needs to be started?
-
I have gained a lot of experience cleaning up spammy links over the past 6 months. This task is the most time consuming and unrewarding task in SEO. It is also necessary if your site has been manually penalized for "inorganic" links.
Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed?
I worked with Google on this topic for a client. My client's site was manually penalized specifically for "inorganic links". The client is an industry leader in their niche doing about $20 million in sales per year. They had millions of manipulative links pointed to their site from over 1000 linking root domains.
Step one: Google was absolutely firm in their expectation the links be removed prior to the penalty being lifted. This client had over 100 websites which were various forms of their main site (i.e. duplicate content). All the duplicate content sites were removed except the legitimate, human translated language variations of the site. We reported to Google these efforts which resulted in about 97% of the links being removed. Google responded that it was not enough and they required the links from the other external sites to be removed.
Step two of the process: we created an Excel spreadsheet to contact the sites giving priority to the sites with the most links. We tracked the following information: date of contact, initials of employee who performed contact, URL of domain, method of contact (e-mail / phone / contact us page), we provided a link to a copy of each e-mail we sent (see notes below), the date a response was received (if any), and a confirmation of whether the link was still visible.
Regarding the e-mails which were sent, they were very polite customized letters for each site. The letter format was as follows: introduction, description of the problem (i.e. our website has been penalized by Google...), the request to remove links, the location (URL) of all known links within their domain, and we thanked them for their efforts.
The results were we contacted hundreds of domains. The response rate was 14%. In this case, the company had these links built by another "SEO company" mostly between 2007 - 2009.
We reported our results to Google, shared the documentation and their response was:
"Thank you for your request and all of the follow up analysis. We've reviewed your case again, and unfortunately there are still many inorganic links pointing to the site. For example:..."
That led to step three: we went back to the original list of linking sites. For each and every site we covered four methods of contact: e-mail (if their address could be located), phone call (if a phone number could be located), contact us page (if the site offered one) and we looked up their WHOIS information and used that method of contact if the information was different then what was previously available.
Additionally, we went ahead and completed the list of contacting EVERY site who showed a link in Google WMT, even the hundreds of sites with only a single link. We knew our efforts would fail (14% rate of success) prior to starting so our focus was providing solid documentation. If you named a link we could present a copy of an e-mail request sent to remove the link, the date/time of when it was sent along with who sent it. That was the goal.
After submitting this final information to Google, they "partially" removed the manual penalty. The site seemed to rank normally but not as well as before. Google's response:
"Hello Ryan,
Thank you for your follow up email and all of the information provided. The documentation you provided was very helpful in processing and understanding this case.
After re-evaluating your site’s backlinks we are able to partially revoke a manual action. There are still inorganic links pointing to your site that we have taken action on. Once you’ve been able to make further progress in getting these links removed, feel free to reply to this email with the details of your clean-up effort"
Another client was also penalized but they had a single SEO company build most of their inorganic links. In this instance, the SEO company was able to remove almost all the links directly. They had control over many of the linking sites, they had retained their usernames / passwords to forums, etc. The success rate of link removal clearly depends on how long ago the links were built, how spammy the sites are (i.e. if you build links on disposable sites which are not monitored, you clearly wont find help having them removed) and how the links were built.
Good Luck,
-Ryan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Can I Safely Establish Homepage Relevancy With Internal Keyword Links?
My website has roughly 1000-2000 pages. However, our homepage is lacking relevancy as to what it is about. One way that I'd like to tackle this problem, is by updating many of our pages with internal linking. I often hear, use exact keyword links with caution, but have assumed this mainly referred to external backlinks. Would it be a disaster to set up our single most relevant keyword on about 300 pages and point it to our homepage? There are breadcrumbs on our site, but the home link uses an image (It's a picture of a house, if you're curious.) Am I better off just to change that to our most relevant keyword? I could use any advice on internal links for establishing better homepage relevancy. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | osaka730 -
Companies creating spammy links to charge money to delete them?
Hi all, Yesterday I was checking out ahrefs.com and realizing that one of our main competitors was getting new spammy links to its website from junk directories, rusian forums, porn sites etc. I found it to be weird but I thought that maybe they hired a black hat company without knowing it. Today I began finding the same type of spammy links pointing to our site. I'm completely sure we did not create them.I was checking out some of the new directory links and their listings consist of new pages including only our company's website and absolutely no descriptions. I did a little more research and find out that many of those new directories/listings belong to the same company ( seems to be located in Argentina, but I'm not sure). I also remembered paying that company long time ago to delete two links to our website that were included in their directories. I have to tell you, I'm completely out of my mind and I really don't know what to do. The two possibilities I can think about are: 1- A competitor has hired somebody to point spam to our site, to our other competitor, and may be some other competitors in the industry.(because as I tell you before our main competitor in the area is getting new spammy links too) 2- These black hat companies that own directories and other junk websites are pointing spam to us to get paid to remove links. Whether is #1 or #2 is getting out of control and I really don't know how to manage it (except from disvowing links as soon as I find them). I would appreciate suggestions/advise. Thanks. Ana
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anagentile0 -
Opinions sought on outbound Links page.
Hello Forum, I'm about the remove my outbound Links page at: http://www.pictureframe.com.au/---obs--picture-frames-links.html I think that Google could be assessing this page as a link scheme, ie: I-link-you-if-you-link me. I haven't received any messages from Google about this but I think the page may be devaluing my site. What do you guys~gals think? Thank you for any and all feedback Paul the Picture Framer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Picframer0 -
Preparing for Penguin: Remove, Disavow, or change to branded
For someone that has 80 root domains pointing to their domain and 10 of them are sitewide backlinks from 10 PR4+ sites. All paid for. All with the same main keyword anchor text Should I advise him to remove the links, dissavow the links, dissavow then remove or just change to branded anchor text for the 10 sitewide links. Another option is to just keep one link (preferrably editorial) from each site. The only reason not to pull them off right away is that the client could not sustain his business with a drop in sales. These are by far the strongest 10 root domains. Eventually, when he has enough good backlinks these are all coming off. There was a huge drop in sales for this site last fall, but it recovered almost completely by changing keyword stuffing and adding ecommerce content. Looking to keep his sales and also prepare for this years updates.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Potential Implications of using the Disavow tool to remove thousands of links
So here's the situation. My companies site has over 30 thousand backlinks from Rippling.info These links all point to 3 product pages, some of which are no longer in production. Apparently a former employee was experimenting with some link farm ideas. My questions are; 1. does anyone here have experience with rippling.info? Is it legit? It seems like a link farm but Google allows adsense ads??? I thought Google was against link farms... 2. if I use the Disavow tool in Webmaster Tools to tell Google these 30k+ incoming links are to be ignored, will there be any consequences? -Google Analytics shows zero referral traffic since jan 1st 2012.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mjmorse0 -
Is it bad to no follow all External LInks at the same time?
I am working on more than 40 EMDs. They are good quality brand sites but they all are interlinked to each other through footer links, side bar links. (and they dont have much of linking root domains) Now Some of those sites have been renovated with new templates and these new sites has very few external links (links going out to our own sites) but some of these old sites has 100s of external links (all these external links of course link to our own sites). But anyways, we are planning to no follow all those external links (links that are linking to our own sites) slowly to avoid penalty? question is, can it be bad to implement no follow to all those links on those sites at the same time?Will Google see it as something fishy? (I don't think so) Also, Is it good strategy to no follow all of them? (I think it is) What you guys think ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Unnatural Link Notification - Third Go Round, specific questions
Hi all, I'm posting what is sure to be a common question, but I can't seem to find much information by searching Q&A over the last month so thought I'd throw this out there. There's a lot of 'what do I do??' questions about 'unnatural link notification', but most of them are from first timers. We're pretty far along in the process and it feels like we're going nowhere, so I was hoping to pick the brains of anyone else who's 'been there'. We have a client that we inherited with an unnatural link profile; they were warned shortly after we took them on (around March was the first warning). We compiled an apologetic letter, specifically identified a previous agency who >was< doing bad things, mentioned things would be different from now on, and provided a list of links we were working on to remove based on WMT and OSE and some other sources. This was submitted in early June. Traffic on the main keyword plummeted; ranking went from top 5 to about mid-page 4. We got hit with that same rash of Unnatural Link warnings on July 23 that everyone else did and after looking around I decided not to respond to those. We got a response to the reinclusion request submitted in June above, saying the site was still violating guidelines. This time I went all out, and provided a Google docs spreadsheet of the over 1,500 links we had removed, listed the other links that had no contact info (not even in WHOIS), listed the links we had emailed/contact formed but got no response, everything. So they responded to that recently, simply saying 'site still violates guidelines' with no other details, and I'm not sure what else I can do. The campaign above was quite an investment of resources and time, but I'm not sure how to most efficiently continue. I promised specific questions, so here they are: Are the link removal services (rmoov, removeem, linkdelete, et al) worth investigating? To remove the 1,500 links I mentioned above I had a full time (low paid) person working for a week. Does Google even reconsider after long engagements like this? Most of what I've read has said that inclusion gets cleared up on the first/second request, and we're at bat for the third now. Due to the lack of feedback I don't know if their opinion is "nope, you just missed some" or "you are so blackhat you shouldn't even bother asking anymore". One of the main link holders is this shady guy who runs literally thousands of directories the client appears in thanks to previous SEO agency, and wants $5 per link he removes. Should I mention this to Google, do they even care? Or is it solely our responsibility? Thanks in advance for any advice;
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icecarats0 -
Spammy Links, SERPs, and Low Competition Keywords
While I've seen a lot of news about Google cleaning up content farms, link farms, and similar spam, I've also seen some companies start ranking very well for niche terms using these same practices. Question: Does Google completely discount links from content farms and similar sites or simply give them low value? Observation: I've seen a company start ranking well (top 3) for several terms when they used be on page 2. When I looked at their links, they are from article farms, directories, do-follow blogs and similar low-vale sources. Relative to others, they have about 10x the volume of links with the precise anchor text they are targeting. I wonder in absence of other information that these spammy links still count for something. Given the low competition for the term, this is enough to boost their rank. Just thoughts some thoughts as we are working on long-tail strategies for some key terms.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeff-rackaid.com0