Which links should I remove?
-
What is your general approach when removing links for a new client? Just taken on some new work and found links that I wouldn't dream of building now (unrelated domain name, blogroll, single word, exact match anchor, dead sites).
However some of these are brand anchor links, and some of the pages have decent Page Rank (2/3/4). Obviously I don't want to remove links that might actually be helping the site in a weird way. It would be good to get an idea of other peoples approach to link removal - what goes, what stays etc?
-
Yeah I deliberately showed you that as a pretty awful example haha! This is what I'm dealing with. Unfortunately most of the links follow a very similar theme and that's why I'm worried I'm going to be removing a lot of links and alerting something at Google!!
Also, there's a few links in the same format as that example, but which have brand anchor texts and the page has Page Rank - I assume it should still go?
-
oh yes, that one definitely has to go! not only is the page full with spammy looking links, the content is also not original but copied or scraped...
-
Hi Philipp
Thanks for your prompt reply. The company did receive a unnatural links message back in July 2012 (along with thousands of other sites at the same time!) - however this was the 'targeted action against links' message rather than a site penalty.
I agree with your rule of thumb but it turns out that most of their links go against this principle - hence my caution! I'm tempted to remove all the links with PR N/A or Zero straight away - I'd be surprised if Google was assigning any value to these anyway.
Obviously I want to future-proof my strategy too - I don't want to have to clean up after getting hit by a penalty or an algorithm update!
Let me show you one of the pages as an example. There's a few links on this page so obviously I'm not revealing who my client is. http://scorec.org/the_plumbing_information_you_need_to_read/
-
That's a tough one, especially since I have no clue what your clients business is...
My rule of thumb: Any link and comment that is obviously made for seo and/or marketing one's own site must go (since it's also bad rep for a company). Everything that doesn't add any value to the content: go!
If the links are situated okay and not obviously spammy you could leave them unless you get a penalty. Same for exact match anchor: if you haven't been penalised there's probably no need to remove them now, but take care not to build more links with the same anchor text.
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
-
Subdomain and Domain Linking Strategy
Here is my question for SEO. We are a mug printing company and we have a website specifically for bulk orders hosted at our main link (example.com). For the purposes of this example we will assume that we only print mugs for bands. Eg. orders for 100 mugs at a time for a band. We have had a need to create stores for bands so that they can then pass a link to their fans to purchase mugs. Our main website deals specifically with bulk orders only with customer provided logos, so extending this workflow to our main domain takes quite a bit of development time. Because of this, we purchased a service that allows us to create stores under the new domain stores.example.com. The root domain is the same as our main domain but there is “stores” in front of the domain. A band’s website that we would create would then look something like : stores.example.com/band1_merchandise These links are going to be spread by the band all over the web, and it is in my hope to be able to take advantage of this. Ideally stores.example.com/band1_merchandise being spread around will also give us a boost to www.example.com My question is how can we benefit the most from bands sharing the subdomain link such that our main website will be able to see an SEO benefit.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | masonwong0 -
Tiered back links
Playing catch up with latest SEO techniques and wanted to ask the community what opinion is with generated tiered back links. For example, in one month having - 50 tier one links, 250 tier two links and 1000 tier three links generated within articles forums, social networks, guestbooks etc. In my view this is blackhat, my question is - is this still acceptable? or will it be damaging my domain? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | w4rdy0 -
Inbound Links Inquiry for a New Site
For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Better ranking competitors have paid links from blog pages
I have a trial of all the tools at the moment and it's a lot of fun. I have been delving into site explorer and found that some competitors have links to them from obvious seo promoting paid blog sites. One has no other links except a paid for blog from a site that openly admits it offers paid marketing and they shot up to 4th on page one for a main keyword phrase. The info from moz and matt cuts video's say not to do this, but it's so tempting. The blog is well written, while I sit here and do the right thing, my competitors have page one. If the blog is well written and is meaningful is it OK and if google ever decide it's paid and don't like it, wouldn't it be better to be page one for 6 months and then recover? I'd love to give the link to the seo, blogger thingy but don't want to come across as promoting it in any way. I am sure there are loads of them anyway.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Peter24680 -
Competitors using unsavoury methods of link building. How to combat?
A lot of my competitors are using a lot of unsavoury/old-fashioned SEO methods to build links but are actually doing really well from it. A few different competitors are buying links in directories, using blogspam comments, forum posts, buying links in other places. The problem is, they all seem to be doing very well with it! What I've always been taught is that these methods are out and they could actually harm you - yet I haven't seen this happen to my competitors. Should I be using these spammy methods too or just concentrate on building quality content and high quality link building?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | charliedouglas1230 -
Suggestion for Link Directory Script?
I own a subscription to PHP Link Directory but was wondering if anyone could suggest an alternative link directory script/software/service to PHPLD. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fergusonconsulting0 -
Manual Penalty Removed - Recovery Times...
Howdy Mozzers, For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback. How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty? Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon. Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem. "Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site." Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Best Link Building Practices to Avoid Over Optimizing
With all the new over opting talk, one of the things mentioned is having the same anchored text linking to a page over and over without variation. Is there a good estimate on how many external linking in keywords should be exact versus how many should be in variation? Also, keeping value of pages links in mind. Would it be best to use [Exact] phrase for the higher PR sites or more relevant higher traffic sites? and save the long tail or keyword variation text for the lesser valued sites. When to use exact phrase and when to long tail is my question/discussion I always stay relevant in my link building, and all my links are liking within context. Because I know that relevancy has been an important factor. After watching this video from Matt Cutt's http://youtu.be/KyCYyoGusqs I assume relevancy is becoming even more of an important factor.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0