Link profile clean up
-
Hello everyone,
we are actively working on cleaning the backlink profile of some of our sites. But I am confused on what needs to be done. Now it's possible to find some toxic or deadly domain where our site has been linked from without our approval, but if we remove all those sites, and may be all the site that have a poor domain authority and/or no PR rank (< 1), our profile will look too clean don't you think? . My questions are :
-
If we over clean our profile are we not manipulating our links, so Google will not like it?
-
Is a natural profile will not be a mix of all those domains (poor and good quality)?
We are trying to see what to keep or try to get deleted/disavow, so we could try to claim some of our lost ranking back
Thanks for your help on this,
Cheers,
Mounir
-
-
Good questions; do you think you're under penalty now? If not, just work on cleaning up the future of your "link building" efforts rather than trying to go in reverse and fix things. A few answers to your questions:
- No, Google will not penalize you for having a profile that is "too clean."
- Google doesn't care if you "manipulate" your link profile. They care if you've built links to manipulate their ranking system. Anchor text is one big sign that you're attempting to increase your rankings for certain terms.
- Google is pretty good at targeting links you've built to increase rankings. The links that will hurt you are those you've built - not the junky links that everyone acquires over time. The only exception might be a spam attack from a competitor, but that's rare and another issue altogether.
If you've built highly-targeted links, take those down. Don't waste your time taking down low-quality links that other people build to you. If you think links you haven't built are harming you, double-check WMT for a penalty and make sure there's no overly-targeted anchor text stemming from your own efforts.
-
"Manipulation" to me suggests that you are wondering if you'll receive some sort of penalty for the search engines only keeping good links and removing bad links. A basic answer is "no" but I would recommend a strategy that would protect you in the event that you somehow got a penalty.
If you are e-mailing webmasters and the like, I would set up a separate gmail account and only use this account for your link removal process. In the event you receive a manual penalty from Google, you can share the details of this account with them to let them know your process. You'll have e-mails that prove your efforts and if you use Google spreadsheets to notate your efforts also, you'll do yourself a huge favor when trying to explain your reasoning for removing all the links. In the spreadsheet, you could have all the links you are trying to remove in one column, the contact dates in successive columns and a column at the end that notate removal date of the link from the webmaster. If you keep this all in the same Gmail account, you'll be able to share the account details with Google in the event of a manual penalty.
That being said, I don't think you'll have a manual penalty issue. The issue I could see is a algorithmic penalty that would come about via the over optimization of the left over links. For the links you are keeping and the links you build going forward, I would recommend using a good mix of anchor text and start to focus more on your brand name. You can use opensiteexplorer.org to download your anchor text and use a pivot table to see the anchor text diversity. I'm sure there are tools out there that will automatically give it to you but I pretty much only use OSE.
I hope this helps
-
@vzPro
Thanks for the feedback, but after anlysis it seems that we have a lot of "unwanted" links, even one from a porn site
I feel that it should be a mix of both world, cleaning + going after good quality links. But I am just not sure how google sees that , as I said if we managed to get rid of all bad links and keep only the good ones is it not some kind of manipulation ?
Thanks again for your feedback though
Cheers,
Mounir
-
Personal Opinion --> Unless you've been it by Google's algorithms, your time is much much much much better served trying to gain quality, authority, relevant links then "cleaning up" old ones.
Unless your links are all exact match anchor text, I wouldn't worry about them. If they are, you could help yourself by asking the sites to link to you differently with a diverse range of anchor text.
All in all, cleaning up takes just as much time as getting new, high quality, highly relevant links. It's all about time management.
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
-
Internal Linking - Post links vs Side Bar Links behaving differently
Hi, I have a question regarding the internal linking behavior. My website is www.hindimeaning.com which is approx 3 years old. I have approx 450 posts. Now i have a widget on right sidebar "Popular posts". A widget below my posts "Related Posts". And a simple html CSS menu above the posts (I removed menu around 6 month before so currently it will not show.) I crawled my site with moz crawler (same are the result from google crawler as well) and it shows menus links as internal links. While sidebar widget "Popular posts" and "Related Posts" are not showing as internal links. If we talk theoretically what i learn till now is "every link on a page behaves as internal link". Then why the widget links are not showing as internal links. Thanks, Mahesh Kumar
Link Building | | chaudhary04890 -
Linking to press coverage, reciprocal links?
We have been generating decent online press coverage with links to our site thanks to our PR agency and I have been asked to link to the online coverage from our website in a 'press coverage' section. My question is would google consider links from our site to the online press coverage as reciprocal links? Thanks
Link Building | | gavinr
Gavin0 -
Links from same server or not?
Hello, I make websites so every website I make has a backlink to my website. Currently all my websites are hosted on server A, but my OWN website is hosted on server B. I plan to move my website to server A too. This will indicate that all the backlinks I have currently are from a difference server, now all these links will come from the SAME server. Will this have any results on my positions? Is this something that you have to take into account? Jeroen
Link Building | | conversal0 -
Best Course of Action For Over Optimized Link Profile
I'm working on a few sites right now and before I came on board, they purchased spammy link building packages. For instance, one site shows 3.8k links from 600 root domains. As you can guess, these are ALL spammy pages with dozens to hundreds of links on each. They're all targeted keywords to the homepage. Our other site shows 600+, and again, all spammy links from unrelated spam sites and free link directory packages. The site in question had duplicate content taken from other sites and about 7 pages total indexed. It has since been updated to a WordPress theme with original content and many additional pages. It also has proper SCHEMA locations as it is a legitimate, local business. We receive next to no organic traffic, the pages don't rank for the terms (duh), and basically I'm concerned with moving forward. I don't want to spend time building legitimate links to our sites if we're already nuked by Google. What I'm asking is, do any of you have experience _successfully _using the disavow tool to remove past links? I really don't think a solid link building campaign to our newly updated site is going to undo the thousands of spammy and over-optimized links we have in place already. How likely is it that Google gets the point that we are a legitimate site with new, fresh content when the site receives legitimate links from related sites and such?
Link Building | | kirmeliux0 -
Link or Ad
I recently requested a link back from a site that is ranking 2nd for a term that i'm working on and they said they would gladly give me the link and remove my competitors but would also like me to have an ad on the same page for an annual fee that i could link to a landing page. I know that paying for links is no good and google can penalize you. so do i pay them and do a no follow to the landing page from the ad and call it a day? and how does google differentiate an ad from a link?
Link Building | | CHiP_RuN0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Why are none of my incoming links showing up in SEOmoz or Google? How do I get good legit incoming links?
There are hundreds of sites that are linking to my website, but nobody is showing it. Google wont display any when using link:eugenecomputergeeks.com, and in webmaster tools it only shows 46 incoming links. SEOmoz shows only 3 links. This just isn't so. Why is this? I DESPERATELY need valid incoming links from well ranked websites , and having lots of trouble getting them. Nobody in town with a well ranked site seems to want to do a link exchange, and I've already made the mistake of buying my way into directories, which didn't do anything good for my rankings. Thanks!
Link Building | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
Link to those that link to you? Worthwhile?
We have thousands and thousands of sites that link to a domain we are working on, many with low page authority and high domain (bloggers, forum posts, etc). Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? I'm not sure what method we would use, maybe some relevant blog comments or social votes. But curious if this could be an effective method.
Link Building | | iAnalyst.com0