Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
-
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains.
Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones?
My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place.
For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Alan -
It's difficult to say whether these links are helping or hindering at the moment - by the sounds of it the report the SEO agency ran was a Link Detox report and the results are purely automated, while I have a lot of faith in the tools from LRT I wouldn't be 100% confident with the results as some of the links may be giving a false positive... however you will most likely be talking about a small change ratios.
Ultimately there is a potential problem if you haven't received a warning yet, so I would look to remove as many of these links as possible - as soon as possible.
-
Well,
If you say a lot of the links have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. Then I would not be worried about removing these links affecting your Da or Pa. They have zero trust flow.
I would def. get rid of sites you think are giving you a penalty. If you need a site review to remove a manual penalty, They will be wanting to see that you made an effort to clean up the bad link profile, not just added some new links.
As well if your site is under a manual penalty, then the new links you build may not be allowed to flow trust fully to your credit.
I would spend a few weeks cleaning up bad links than after that split the time half and half building new high quality links and removing the bad ones.
Hope that helps.
-
I think it really does not matter but personally I would focus on cleaning up your link profile then focus on your quality content to gain natural links and social shares.
You can reach out to other web masters to achieve links but honestly (if you have a manual penalty) I would be focusing my time and efforts on getting the penalty lifted first.
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
-
Confused about repeated occurences of URL/essayorg/topic/ showing up as 404 errors in our site logs
Working on a Wordpress website, https://thedoctorwithin.comScanning the site’s 404 errors, I’m seeing a lot of searches for URL/essayorg/topic, coming from Bingbot, as well as other spiders (Google, OpensiteExlorer). We get at least 200 of these irrelevant requests per week. Seems like each topic that follows /essayorg/ is unique. Some include typos: /dissitation/Haven't done a verification to make sure the spiders are who they say they are, yet.Almost seems like there are many links ‘in the wild’ intended for Essay.Org that are being directed towards the site I’m working on.I've considered redirecting any requests for URL/essayorg/ to our sitemap… figuring that might encourage further spidering of actual site content. Is redirection to our sitemap xml file a good idea, or might doing so have unintended consequences? Interested in suggestions about why this might be occurring. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | linkjuiced0 -
Removed URLs
Hi all, We have recently removed 200+ articles from our blog. However, those links are still being shown on Google weeks after their removal. In there a way to speed up the process? What effect will this have on our SEO ranking?
Technical SEO | | businessowner0 -
Removing a staging area/dev area thats been indexed via GWT (since wasnt hidden) from the index
Hi, If you set up a brand new GWT account for a subdomain, where the dev area is located (separate from the main GWT account for the main live site) and remove all pages via the remove tool (by leaving the page field blank) will this definately not risk hurting/removing the main site (since the new subdomain specific gwt account doesn't apply to the main site in any way) ?? I have a new client who's dev area has been indexed, dev team has now prevented crawling of this subdomain but the 'the stable door was shut after the horse had already bolted' and the subdomains pages are on G's index so we need to remove the entire subdomain development area asap. So we are going to do this via the remove tool in a subdomain specific new gwt account, but I just want to triple check this wont accidentally get main site removed too ?? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to structure rich / multi-media on Category pages to pass the link juice?
Fellow SEOs, I'm trying to add videos, blog posts and new fun articles/top 10s/party tips etc to corresponding categories for a costume site. Some of the content I want on these category pages already exists on our blog, the videos are hosted on YouTube and some of the content hasn't been created yet. We're thinking of posting snippets of the articles that link to the full versions vs. displaying the entire pieces on the cat pages.We're also thinking of a 'view all cool content' under the snippets that brings you to a page similar to : www.site.com/pirate-costumes/funideas and it would list everything we have for media for that category - i obviously just want to do what's best for the user but also what will maintain the juice from the media on into the category pages - Another issue would be duplicate content issues arising from posting snippets and/or the same copy that also lives on the blog...**Can someone please help here? Would _really _appreciate it.****Thank you! **Troy
Technical SEO | | Troyville0 -
Google Reconsideration Request (Penguin) - Will Google give links to remove?
When Penguin v1 hit, our site took a hit for a single phrase (i.e. "widgets") due to the techniques our SEO company was using (network). We've since had those links cleaned up, and our rankings have not recovered. Our SEO company said they submitted a reconsideration request on our behalf, and that Google denied it and didn't provide which links we needed removed. Does Google list links that need removing if they are still not happy with your link profile?
Technical SEO | | crucialx0 -
Getting a link removed from brand search - please help!
Hello all you mozzers! Ive just come into work with an established company who have one major problem when you google "palicomp" the second link that comes up is to consumeractiongroup with a thread that has been damaging the business for over 2 years, this thread is absolutely not representative of the business today. Strangely stronger links in search have better authority but google has ranked this post as being highly relevant to the business, does anybody know of any strategies we can do to get this removed, we have contacted consumeractiongroup directly but they are not prepared to move it. Does anyone have any idea of removal ideas or what we can do its crippling our business, we cant work out as to why its ranking better! Chris
Technical SEO | | palicomp0 -
Clickable links in video?
Hi, I am creating a website for mobile devices and have planned to use videos at certain places. I want to have a clickable url inserted at the end of the video. Any suggestions how may i do it? Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Can I reduce link count by no following links?
Hi, A large number of my pages contain over 100 links. This is due to a large drop down navigation which is on every page. To reduce my link count could I just no follow these navigation links or would I have to remove the navigation completely?
Technical SEO | | moesian0