How to remove non-requested, non-desired backlinks
-
Dear Mosers,
Before Penguin update we start a link back profile study about who and why are linking and we found hundred of garbage sites like these:
http://rakeback-blogger.com/links/
and hundred more...
They don't have contact form or email address, so what is the best way to remove our link from there (there are any quick way), these sites are damaging our rank.
Thank you for your help
Claudio
-
If the drop started April 23 then it's not likely to be Penguin. However, it's a tough call because you could have had a natural drop that started on April 23 and then got augmented on the 24th. But, there were Panda refreshes on April 19 and 27th. I'm pretty reluctant to call it either without a real in depth look at your analytics.
Penguin is generally a keyword specific drop, so if you can pinpoint that you have dropped for particular keywords that have been overoptimized in your backlink profile then you could go in this direction. However, the backlinks that you pointed out originally all seem to have your url as anchor text so I have a hard time believing that this is Penguin. (With that being said, I haven't done a full analysis of your site and backlink profile.)
What made me wonder if this was Panda was that your inner pages have very little content above the fold. All of the content above the fold seems to be the same for each page. And then, the content that is below the fold is mostly brief product descriptions - not a lot that Google can recognize as substantial content.
Again, I'd be really hesitant to go removing links in this case. If this were my site I'd do the following:
-have a really thorough look at my analytics to see if the traffic drop can be attributed to one or more particular keywords
-if yes, then I'd start cleaning up links that contained those keywords as anchors.
-if no, then I'd start changing my pages so that there is more substantial content, especially above the fold, for each of these pages. I'd also go looking for other places where I could be violating the quality guidelines on page such as hidden text, etc. Then, once this was cleared up I'd wait for the next Panda refresh to see if I had recovered.
-
Dear all,
I found this history google update doc http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
and Penguin starts on Apr 24 and Apr 27 another Panda.
In conclusion (I want to share my point of view coming from your knowledge):
1. Penguin hits our site because, we has a few high quality links and some of them was hitted by Penguin. Possible solution get more links (natural etc).
2. Panda, some of our pages specially categories and sub categories were including repetitive content and canonical problems between them (this issue was partially resolved). I'll continue resolving this.
Finally please give me your opinions about this.
Thank you again for all your help, Im very happy to participate with you in SEOMOz and I think this is a great community!
-
Dear Marie,
Our Drops starts on April 23 to April 30 (500 visitors to 280) you're correct, so it was a Panda hit?
Thank you for all your help
Claudio
-
I would not work to remove them, yet.
I think that you are getting great advice from Marie. I would listen to her opinions.
-
Have a close look to see if your traffic drop coincides with either April 19th or April 27th which are days of Panda refreshes. In looking at your inner pages I'm starting to wonder if this is a Panda issue....
-
I wouldn't go removing links until you know that the links are actually what are causing your drop. The majority of these links are pointing at your home page so it would be weird for your inner pages to drop if they were causing you a problem. If you remove a bunch of links you could possibly do more harm than good!
Can you pinpoint your traffic drop to a particular day? Try looking at your analytics and selecting organic search traffic. If you can pinpoint a particular day then you may be able to determine if this is Penguin related or not. It could be a Panda issue and if that's the case then it's really nothing to do with your backlinks, but rather an onsite issue.
And there are other possible reasons as well! So again, don't go on a massive link removal campaign until you are sure that that's what needs to be done!
-
Dear EGOL,
No warnings from google, only traffic drops -50% (actually our Home page ranks well) but the internal pages not.
I extract from SEOMoz the links and I start sending them emails asking for link removal and no one has responded, and some of them don't have contact form or email details, I'll try contact them via Whois records.
Do you recommends perform this HUGE and slave task with minimal results or only forget and go ahead.
I appreciate your opinions and help
Thank you
Claudio
-
Dear Marie,
Our traffic drops on Apr and May at 50%, and some pages (not home) was performing well (google 3 first positions) and now they are on the 2 or 3rd page.
Honestly Im very worried about that.
I appreciate all your help
Claudio
-
Some of my sites have lots of backlinks from trashy directories and mash-up sites. I had nothing to do with getting these links. They are gifts from people who are making spammy websites.
I think that most websites acquire lots of these links over time - especially if you have a website that ranks well in popular SERPs. If you had nothing to do with placing them then I would not worry about them unless google sends you a warning.
-
This doesn't look like any kind of negative SEO campaign to me. The majority of your backlinks (including the ones that you are asking about) use your url as an anchor. If someone was attempting to try to get you a penguin hit or an unnatural links warning they'd be spamming you with a keyword anchor. (And it's debatable whether that would even work.)
It looks to me like you are still in the index and you are ranking #1 for the term that you are targeting in your home page title.
How do you feel these links are affecting your traffic? If you had an unnatural links penalty then you wouldn't be ranking. If you had a penguin hit then there would be a dramatic traffic drop on April 24 or May 25.
Otherwise I'm guessing there's something else going on. How dramatic is your traffic drop? Is it for all keywords or just specific ones?
It's possible that you lost some link equity because sites that link to you got hit with a penalty. And there are many other possible reasons.
-
No one from here works with backlinks services, I think it can be performed by one competitor, from years til now.
our site is freesharewaredepot.com please take a look and give us your ideas or something that Im mis.
Thank you
Claudio
-
Have you tried the whois info? A site's contact info is USUALLY in there. However, I have found that only a small percentage of website owners actually respond to the emails I have sent via whois info.
Just a question, and not meant to be condemning at all, but how do you think you got hundreds of links like this? It sounds to me like something that would happen after using a backlink service. (You know, the kind that promises hundreds of links for one low price.) I've got a few such spammy links to my site, but not hundreds.
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
-
What IP Address does Googlebot use to read your site when coming from an external backlink?
Hi All, I'm trying to find more information on what IP address Googlebot would use when arriving to crawl your site from an external backlink. I'm under the impression Googlebot uses international signals to determine the best IP address to use when crawling (US / non-US) and then carries on with that IP when it arrives to your website? E.g. - Googlebot finds www.example.co.uk. Due to the ccTLD, it decides to crawl the site with a UK IP address rather than a US one. As it crawls this UK site, it finds a subdirectory backlink to your website and continues to crawl your website with the aforementioned UK IP address. Is this a correct assumption, or does Googlebot look at altering the IP address as it enters a backlink / new domain? Also, are ccTLDs the main signals to determine the possibility of Google switching to an international IP address to crawl, rather than the standard US one? Am I right in saying that hreflang tags don't apply here at all, as their purpose is to be used in SERPS and helping Google to determine which page to serve to users based on their IP etc. If anyone has any insight this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos0 -
Low quality links on non www version only?
Spam links showing up on non-www version only. Why is this? And is it still important to remove these links even though the preferred domain is www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LinkRightMedia0 -
Any success stories after removing excessive cross domain linking?
Hi, I found some excessive cross domain linking from a separate blog to the main company website. It sounds like best practice is to cut back on this, but I don't have any proof of this. I'm cautious about cutting off existing links; we removed two redundant domains that had a huge number of links pointing to the main site almost 1 year ago, but didn't see any correlated improvement in rankings or traffic per se. Hoping some people can share a success story after pruning off excessive cross linking either for their own website or for a client's. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Best Approach to Get Backlinks for this site
Hello, What would be a good approach to gain backlinks for this site: www.nlpca.com The owners don't have much time to write content. I as the consultant have time but do not have the expertise the owners do. The people that run the site are authorities in the field. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Add noindex,nofollow prior to removing pages resulting in 404's
We're working with another site that unfortunately due to how their website has been programmed creates a bit of a mess. Whenever an employee removes a page from their site through their homegrown 'content management system', rather than 301'ing to another location on their site, the page is deleted and results in a 404. The interim question until they implement a better solution in managing their website is: Should they first add noindex,nofollow to the pages that are scheduled to be removed. Then once they are removed, they become 404's? Of note, it is possible that some of these pages will be used again in the future, and I would imagine they could submit them to Google through Webmaster Tools and adding the pages to their sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Open Site Explorer not Seeing 301 Redirect to non-www
I cannot figure out why open site explorer doesn't see that when you go to http://preferredroofingkc.net/ it redirects to http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/ This is a wordpress installation that uses a cannonical url http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/ The HTACCESS file also has a 301 redirect as follows: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^preferredroofingkc.net [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/$1 [L,R=301] But, open site explorer still shows these sites separately without alerting that there is a 301 redirect.0 -
My site dropped in serp and backlinks ranked higher than it.
appliance-repair-ny.com I recently got some new good page rank backlinks (4-5) to my site. After a nice increase in rankings i left it for a couple of day (holiday) when i came back i found out that my rankings dropped dramatically for many different keywords when in some cases the backlinks are listed higher than me for the keyword. Any suggestions? should i keep on building links in the same paste, or slow down a little? UPDATE: I now noticed that the seomoz app has a warning that my homepage is missing title tag and meta tag. I'm using wordpress and headspace plugin. I recently updated wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atohad0