Removing thousands of shady backlinks?
-
Hey guys,
We've been hired to redesign a website that has thousands of backlinks created by a (possibly) shady offshore company, and I'm wondering if anyone out there has experience dealing with a deletion of this size and type. Is it as simple as just disavowing the whole lot?
Thanks,
Jason
-
The site is ranking well and was not affected from Penguin. However, we believe the amount of bad backlinks (ranging from hundreds to thousands) will hurt the site's ranking soon. Our client has yet to receive any manual warning from Google as well.
-
Jason
You have some great detailed answers from Marie and Marcus. I guess the question I'd like to ask is, Why are you looking into this ? Did you get to a point where your site is not ranking as well before ? Or is it that you got an actual un-natural links warning ?
That could help justify what the next steps should be.
-
Marie:
Sorry, but I couldn't resist responding to this one. It's not the answer that's confusing, it's the situation. I like to compare modern SEO to fixing Macs (what I did in my previous lifetime). Sometimes you have to get out the goat entrails and burn the incense.
Sometimes there isn't an easy answer. Strangely enough on my site (which I inherited 3 months ago), the "bad" links don't seem to have really damaged it, as we have a Domain Authority of 63. Go figure.
Jim
-
The answer depends on whether or not the site has a manual penalty against it. If there is a message in WMT of unnatural links then it won't be enough to just disavow. You've got to go through a whole process of trying to manually remove links and reporting your efforts to Google and then disavowing the rest.
If you want to simply have those backlinks nofollowed then disavowing the whole lot will do the trick.
However, be careful if you're disavowing all of the links. I have seen cases where people went disavowing links willy nilly and did more harm than good. If the plan is to simply start over with a clean slate then go ahead and disavow. The problem is that these links will still be present in your backlink profile whether you use OSE, ahrefs, majestic or even WMT. They will simply be treated as nofollowed by Google.
But if you are trying to save some of the existing rankings then whether or not you disavow can be a complicated decision.
For example, the links could be shady, but if the site hasn't been affected by Penguin then you may not have to remove them. Some of them could actually be helping. Remember, Penguin is an algorithm and doesn't catch EVERYTHING.
Or, for another example, if the site has been affected by Penguin for certain keywords then you may not be able to rank for those keywords until you get rid of Penguin. But here's the problem - no one really knows with certainty how to do that. Some SEOs will tell you that disavowing all your links will clear it. Some will tell you that Penguin has already disavowed all of your links and all you need to do is get some good links. There are very few (if any) case studies that really show a site what to do.
How's that for a confusing answer? LOL!
-
Hey Jason
In a word, no, no way that simple. Google are simply not going to process that disavow unless they see you (or your client) have made a considerable effort in the removal of those links. In all likelyhood, it will take a good few months and some considerable effort to show that you have gone to lengths enough to satisfy them.
There are a bunch of tools that can help, but ultimately, there is still a lot of manual work involved in any clean up.
Few pointers.
Tools worth bothering with.
- Removeem
- Rmoov
- Link Detox
None of these will do the job for you and in all likelihood, you will want to use all three. Beyond that, if there is a redesign you can 404 old pages on the other site to kill inbound links but if most of your shady links are pointing at the homepage, there is not a lot you can do about them other than clean up and attempt a disavow.
You are going to have to document the whole process from putting together a list of candidate links for removal & collecting email addresses through to every removal request. I would also suggest possibly going beyond just the email and looking at phone numbers, letters and anything else you can do to show the level of effort required.
Depending on the history and any penalties you are going to want to submit your disavow and a reconsideration request detailing all of your tireless and persistant efforts.
In summary, it's not terribly hard or complicated, but there is just a whole bunch of work involved to do the job properly and to a level that Google is going to be happy with and don't expect results over night. My advice would be to brief your client that a honest clean up could take up to three months and three reinclusion requests along with a considerable investment in man hours to do the job properly.
This is a good job for an intern or apprentice. Well, let me rephrase that, it's a good job to give to an intern or apprentice, it's likely going to be quite a sucky job for them to have to do but baptism of fire and all!
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
Will removing the trailing slash impact my SEO?
Hi there, We have a company website based on Wordpress. I just noticed that under Settings > Permalinks I can configure the look of the URLs and even remove the trailing slash. We have about 2-300 pages online. If I remove the trailing slash now, will that negatively impact our SEO in anyway for existing pages? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Amr-Haffar0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
Remove Directory In Webmaster Tools
Hey Moz'erz, I'm removing some URLS from the index and want to confirm the use of the "remove directory" request. If my structure is this: /blogs/customer-success-stories/tagged/ --- all pages that are /tagged/abc, /tagged/dce etc. will be removed correct? First time trying a directory removal as their are 100 plus of these tagged pages. Comments, suggestions and past experiences welcome!
Technical SEO | | paul-bold0 -
Will rel canonical tags remove previously indexed URLs?
Hello, 7 days ago, we implemented canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues that had been caused by URL parameters. These "duplicate content" had already been indexed. Now that the URLs have rel canonical tags in place, will Google automatically remove from its index the other URLs with the URL parameters? I ask because we have been tracking the approximate number of URLs indexed by doing a site: search in Google, and we have barely noticed a decrease in URLs indexed. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | yacpro130 -
Asking to remove links from other sites
How hard is it to get people to take off links that point to your site that are on theirs? I have about 4 sites that I would like my link OFF of their blogroll because I think I was hit by the penguin update because of that. Do you know if there is anything you can do if they DON'T take it off?
Technical SEO | | SeaC0 -
Having trouble removing homepage from google
For various reasons my client wants their homepage removed from google, no just the content of the page off but the page not to be indexed (yep strange request but we are mere service providers) today I requested in webmaster tool that default.asp was removed. Wht says done but the sites homepage is still listed. The page also has a no index tag on but 24 hours and 18k Google bot hits later it still remains. Anyone got any other suggestions to deindex just the homepage asap please
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Subdomain Removal in Robots.txt with Conditional Logic??
I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help! I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0 -
Removing GWT Geo-Targeting
Hi, if I have a website in Google Webmaster Tools > Geographic Target set to United States, but I want to promote it in other specific countries, 1. Do I have to change the geo-targeting in GWT so it does not target a specific country? (discarding the option of adding sub-domain to GWT) 2. If I remove the GWT geo-targeting would it affect my rankings in the US? Thank you
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0