Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?
-
If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't. Is there any reason to remove them? If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.
-
Links that have been discounted do indeed factor into penalties. In fact, they're probably the links you want to remove FIRST because these are sites/pages that Google has already flagged. You should absolutely remove them, especially if you're under penalty of some sort.
Removing links is indeed a bit of a two-edged sword in that you often cut out some spam links that Google doesn't (yet) know about. That said, leaving the links in place is the poorer option in my view, as it prevents you from moving forward with a long-term strategy.
If all of your links are manipulative, it might be better just to start a new site rather than cleaning up to return to 0.
-
Again this issue has come up. Anyone with any insight into this:
-
If he has little-to-no natural, high authority links, changing to a new domain may be a better move.
-
Once again, it all comes down to "do you have real, natural, high quality links pointing to your site?" If you only have a couple, it may be easier to move domains and contact those link owners to point to new url. If you have many good links that would improve rankings, it may be easier to remove/disavow the bad links instead of getting all those links changed to point to new location.
-
Is it a bad idea for him to move the content to a new domain and be more careful about the links he acquires?
-
Thank you for the response. However, it's not what I'm looking for. I agree with the process my have mentioned for having penalty removed. However, I'm asking about this specific penalty:
Unnatural Links - Partial Match - affecting some links.
If Google has already discounted these links and my rankings dropped as a result. Is there any benefit to hiring a company for $1,000 to identify which links need to go and than pay $ per link to have them removed. Finally putting the rest in a disavow file and sending it into Google.
Say they do remove the "penalty" would it do any good. Did they discount the links AND hit my site with a penalty or did they just discount the links rendering having the "penalty" removed pointless.
-
Hi Beastrip,
In our opinion it wont make much difference for quit a while, however a ship shape website is what we should all strive for, and what Google likes most. If you were to put the hours of labor into correcting this issue the return on investment will disappoint you. So you should never let the problem get that bad, where you are being penalized in the first place. A clean ship will be handsomely rewarded, one that is in disrepair and neglected will not reach the same results, and will struggle to regain what it could have had if well maintained.
-
You should attempt to remove them and add them to disavow list. Then in the RR, mention what you've done to fix the penalty.
If your rankings are based mostly on the manipulated links, your rankings will drop hard (which is most often the case). Once the penalty is removed though, start working on obtaining natural links so you can return to ranking. If the page/domain has no natural links, it may be easier to just start fresh.
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
-
Linking from a corporate site to a brand site.
Is there an SEO impact to a large corporation linking from a corporate and/or a divisional site to a specific brand site with it's own top level domain? We would like to keep the traffic coming, but not if it will be seen as a black hat tactic. My guess is that Google will be smart enough to see that the corporation owns the brand and at least not penalize us, but I am wondering if anyone else has this experience? Google Analytics is calling it self-referral.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrbobland0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
How can i stop such links being indexed
Hi, How can i stop such links being indexed The first link is what i want to stop indexed. We have 1,000's of people writing articles and the below URl shows how many articles each did http://www.somename.com/article/15633 But this is the URl which shows the exact articlehttp://www.Somename.com/article/step-step-installation-ibm-lotus-notesAs both start as thishttp://www.Somename.com/article/How can i set noindex? Should we set for each URL manually one by oneThanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Biggest Benefit for Footer Links "Created by ___?"
Greetings Mozzers, I wanted to see how I can get the most bang for my buck in regards to footer links back to my site. I understand that the footer is one of the weakest areas for links, however, I have many sites that I have done and want to get the most benefit from the footer area where I say created by etc. First Question: Is there a chance to get some value at of this area? Second Question: What is the best structure to use to get the most benefit from this opportunity? If there is zero value within this region and I can't get any benefit, would the following penalize me? Current Structure Used: Powered by MonsterWeb (On hover the title tag reveals a small 10 word sentence about us.) Additional clarification would be greatly apprecaited.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Site Wide Link Situation
Hi- We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RezStream80 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
What does "base" link mean here?
On http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394, it says: rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link. Where would a document specify a base link? And how?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0