30,746 Links from One Site to Our Site

[Prospector-Plastics]

I learned this morning in our Google Webmaster Account about a website has 30,746 links to our website. Both our website and their site present information related to plastic materials, so in essence they complement one another.

However, is having that massive amount of links from one site to ours a bad thing and should we use Google Disavow?

Also, they have a PR3 while our site is PR5 (not sure if that matters much).

[Prospector-Plastics]

I think that article alone just scared me away from using Disavow

Thanks Mike!

[Mike.Goracke]

Just a heads-up: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land.

It states a few interesting thing:

"Matt Cutts warned about using the disavow links tool with caution, and if it were me, I take any warning from him to the heart."

AND

"If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

Just saying... be careful.

Mike

[Prospector-Plastics]

In looking at their site, they are a Chinese distributor of plastic materials. They do in fact have a link to our homepage in their footer throughout the website, which appears to be about 13,200 pages (according to site:www.site.com on Google - not super accurate from what I understand, but gives a general idea).

Since there are so many links, digging around it looks like for every plastic they sell, they link to the technical information on our site. My gut instinct just to be safe is to disavow as there appear to be a handful of Chinese sites doing the same thing. I'm thinking this because our site is linked to from several very high level authority sites with solid PR like UL.com and hundreds of .edu's (not sure if edu domains matters that much any more).

[TomRayner]

Taking an educated guess at this, I imagine that those links are coming from a site-wide anchor that is in the blogroll of footer of the website, and not so much contextual links linked from within relevant content. (I could be wrong, but over 30k makes me think it's on every page of the site).

Regardless of the anchor text, this is a very unnatural link profile. If the links are passing PageRank (that is to say, they are follow links and not marked with "nofollow"), then it is giving Google every reason to assume that the links are only there to pass PageRank and manipulate your site's search visibility.

If this is the case, I'd get in touch with the other site and ask the link to be removed or made "nofollow" ASAP. Should you get no response, you should do a site-wide disavow.

As you may have deduced, if the links are "nofollow", which you can check by viewing the source code or with the Mozbar extension for Chrome or Firefox, then they shouldn't be a problem.  Similarly, if they contextual links that point to relevant pages on your website and are designed to help the user, again there shouldn't be much of a problem, unless the anchor text is very targeted.

If they're all passing PageRank, however, it could be seen as a very unnatural signal by Google and they may well penalise you for it.

Hope this helps.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Makes sense, thank you Mike.

All incoming links from the site link to various pages of technical information on our site about plastic materials, and little if any link to our homepage.

[Mike.Goracke]

That does seem like a lot of links; however, if it is linking to relevant content and is doing so with using unique and applicable anchor text, I would think you should be fine.

If it is always linking to your root domain with the same anchor text every time, that may raise a red flag.

Long story short - if it looks natural and makes sense, you "should" be fine.

Hope this helps.

Mike