What would you consider a "bad link"?
-
So, our website has a pretty profound collection of inbound links- which no one has really been taking care of the past 10 years. lol. Our users love us and they love to talk about us every chance they get. Which is great, except that I am new to the company and I am trying to sort through our links. Lots of them come from foreign forums and some are even in "hacking" forums, because some of our "not so great" users abuse our service. So, how am I am to tell what links and sites are good vs. bad? I have found some that are on old industry related link sites, I should definitely try to get rid of those right? Thanks in advance for the help and sorry if I am being unclear.
-
I'm more concerned about the number of domains rather than the number of links. Google's usually pretty good at figuring out that those 14000 links are actually just one domain.
If you've got a pattern of obviously manipulative linking then you may want to consider removing them. But you could do yourself more harm than good in doing so though. If the vast majority of your link profile is natural I'd ignore those self made links. The only exception would be, perhaps, if these links all contained anchor text for which you were trying to rank. Then there's a chance that a future Penguin refresh could get ahold of that. It's a tough call.
-
I think any natural link is fine as long as its not a gambling, pharmaceutics or porn website. I would caution to make sure that there isn't any negative SEO going on, but it sounds like you have a self sustaining link building campaign without having to do anything.
-
Thanks for that! These are all natural links, except for one case. When the site was first established, they had users that were interested use a referral program. If the user posted our image with a link to our site, they could earn referral points. Are these bad? I was thinking yes. One site alone is linking up to 14k times.
-
Did you, (or an SEO on your behalf) actually build any of these links? Or did they come to you naturally? If you didn't build them, don't worry about them.
I have a site for which I have done no link building. It is a content site that only attracts natural links. Even this site has some spammy links, but I'm not worried one bit about removing them.
You don't need to remove links unless you have been building them yourself. Now some would argue that you may want to remove links in the case of negative SEO, but that is really rare.
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
-
Am I better off with ten links from one site or one link from ten sites?
I am writing a series of linked-back articles for a highly-ranked web publisher, but wonder if I'd be better off sharing the articles across different sites. My goal is to grow our domain authority and SEO rankings.
Link Building | | Lysarden0 -
Linking Between Sites
Hi everyone, Hope you are all doing well. If a company owns several different websites that are supposed to be different brands but are part of the same niche/sector is it OK to link between them? Or would this be seen as violation? Thanks
Link Building | | National-Homebuyers0 -
"Bad" backlinks
Hello dear community, I am new here and quite new to SEO. Perhaps someone could give me a hint on a following question: Which tools can help me to track "bad" baclinks, e. g. links which would rather downgrade my SEO performance?
Link Building | | hochzeitsfotograf0 -
"ghost" links on opensite explorer
today I've checked link building progress for a site I am working on. I've noticed lots of new links and new domains, I was happy but a bit surprised because I havent'y done any serious link building yet. investigating more, I've checked the pages that should be linking my site, and these pages are on totally unreleated sites or they doesn't even exist! as an example, my site is about road bicycles, and opensite report this links: www.murrayschicken.com/
Link Building | | DavideM
murrayschicken.com/alejandro-suaya
murrayschicken.com/weeds-actress
murrayschicken.com/gt-bikes-bump
murrayschicken.com/goldie-gray
murrayschicken.com/anna-elias
murrayschicken.com/brian-joseph-ochab and 14 more as you can see, these pages are down. probably never existed. so what's happen? opensite is getting crazy? www.murrayschicken.com/ has been got hacked? my client is doing some black hat link building? any opinions?0 -
Are link exchanges bad for SEO these days? Also, is adding my site to free yet relevent directory sites a bad idea?
I operate a computer services company in Eugene, Oregon called "Eugene Computer Geeks". We do a lot of web design, and need incoming links to my site very badly. Lately I've been asking clients if they would link to me, but they almost always ask for a link in return. If we exchange links, does Google penalize my site? Would the incoming link be better for SEO if I'm not linking back to the other site? ALSO Is it possible that manually submitting my site to free, yet relevant web directories would hurt my rankings? It's not a big deal to me if it doesn't help my rankings, as I see a benefit to having my site listed, but wanted to make sure there wasn't a chance that it would hurt my rankings. As far as I know all the directories are free from SPAM, porn, warez, or anything like that. Thanks!
Link Building | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
How many nofollow links should we build to have a natural link profile
Hi guys, As with many link builders we have been building lots of dofollow links for our site, so many that mainly our incoming links are dofollow. Some pages have 99.5% dofollow external links which I know is not very natural. In your experience in terms of percentage how much should you have in terms of nofollow external links in your link profile. I noticed SEOMoz has about 12-13% nofollow external links, shall I go with this figure? Thanks guys. David
Link Building | | sssrpm0 -
Link building for rankings VS Link building for relationships
A Big Shout To Everyone -- Good Morning and What's Up 🙂 As I read today through seomoz professional guide to link building and the section why link building matters and in addition to this a newsletter I received today that changed my whole thinking towards link building for rankings vs for relationships. It is already happening on social networks if you are active there, but what about on your website. What are your thoughts on the following ? Google's job is provide the most relevant results to surfers online, and looking the link profile of a site & the page itself is the key to determining which page to serve on plate to the surfers link query ! Webmasters Site Objective:
Link Building | | helpwanted
I think that we as webmasters have to ask ourselves what do we want to achieve with link building. To get quick traffic or build slow authority links, high rankings, lead generation, sales & other things here I may be missing etcccc Other Objective Networking & Relationship Building Alliances : What I discovered today is that building links for 1st page rankings are great and will provide me with steady traffic, but not all of it is targeted traffic, but what else can I do to bring targeted traffic and at the same time try to build alliances with other related non competing business owners online. The idea... is to apply old school networking / relationship building alliances to get targeted traffic to my site that can actually benefit from my services. How Do We Achieve This I become a editor for approving resource links for me site, only the best will be placed on my site as a resource. Build a valuable tightly themed categorized resource section with related non competing resources that can help my sites visitors find what they are looking for, send visitors to non competing resources that may purchase their services which helps me build a relationship with them, and may can with rankings as well, provided I am selective with my qualification process. Questions & Concerns Below : What should I be thinking about when creating a resource categorized links page How many outgoing do follow links should I allow from this links partner page How will this links resource page affect my own SE 1st Page Rankings and is it worth it based on getting targeted traffic Any pros / cons I may be missing here0 -
Link Churn - where have all my links gone?
I am sure most of you have asked yourself the question I'm asking right now.. Where have all my links gone? I am starting to get twitchy now. I would estimate we have lost around 60% of our links in the past 3 weeks. Does anyone have any comeback stories? Feel like I am back to the start again. I have made a number of changes on the site not least removing a reciprical link page.. that had over 200 links on it but from reading one of Rand's tweets is it true that linking out could be good again?
Link Building | | robertrRSwalters0