Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Disavow links leading to 404
-
Looking at the link profile anchor text of a site i'm working on new links keep popping up in the reports with let's say very distasteful anchor text. These links are obviously spam and link to old forum pages for the site that doesn't exist any more, so the majority seem to trigger the 404 page.
I understand that the 404 page (404 header response) does not flow any link power, or damage, but given the nature and volume of the sites linking to the "domain" would it be a good idea to completely disassociate and disavow these domains?
-
Unfortunately we usually appear to learn more from huge problems than from nice and successful experiences...
That’s the massive profit on sharing; we can profit from others experience!
Cheers
[URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/yhmjs1P][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/yhmjs1P.jpg[/IMG][/URL])
-
thanks. You've confirmed my thoughts on doing a thorough spring clean.
-
Thanks for the info.
-
Hi Michael / Chris
In this case, unfortunately I have a harsh experience which makes me differ with Chris´s experience; I would definitely go forward with disavowing if you are really interested on making clear for Google that you do not value those links, even if they point to non-existing urls
A couple of years back we had a client (and still have it) with a huge hack that produced thousands of links pointing to pages of our client´s hacked domain. We even suspected of a “black hat” maneuver to make damage to our client´s SEO through this procedure.
We had a hell of a problem letting Google understand that those links where empty and pointed to a 404, even after we deleted all the content and the urls didn´t exist anymore... strange behavior still happened from time to time and until the appearance of disavow tool….unexpectedly Google re indexed those links, even that they pointed already for YEARS to nonexistent 404 urls
I would take the time and disavow if you are really interested on Google not indexing those links.
I hope you can profit from this experience.
Cheers to you both, form sunny southern Spain!
-
Thanks Chris. Yes I agree no harm. To be honest this is in the mix of getting Partial Matches: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links "...so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links..."
I don't totally subscribe to Google just removing link flow from the links they refer to and that's that nothing to worry about. So in the back of my mind i'm looking at a complete purge even if not technically applicable.
-
Michael,
Of course their's no harm in disavowing domains you're talking about (and not much time involved with doing it) but technically, those links are pointing to resources that doesn't exist and I've not heard of anyone who says they've been hurt by links pointing to non-existing resources on their domain. In fact, before we had the disavow tool, changing the url of a page with bad back links was a method used to try to avoid penalties.
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
-
New Flurry of thousands of bad links from 3 Spammy websites. Disavow?
I also discovered that a website www.prlog.ru put 32 links to my website. It is a russian site. It has a 32% spam score. Is that high? I think I need to disavow. Another spammy website link has spam score of 16% with with several thousand links. I added one link to the site medexplorer.com 6 years ago and it was fine. Now it has thousands of links. Should I disavow all three?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
Dealing with links to your domain that the previous owner set up
Hey everyone, I rebranded my company at the end of last year from a name that was fairly unique but sounded like I cleaned headstones instead of building websites. I opted for a name that I liked, it reflected my heritage - however it also seems to be quite common. Anyway, I registered the domain name as it was available as the previous owner's company had been wound up. It's only been in the last week or two where I've managed to have a website on that domain and I've been tracking it's progress through Moz, Google & Bing Webmaster tools. Both the webmaster tools are reporting back that my site triggers 404 errors for some specific links. However, I don't have or have never used those links before. I think the previous owner might have created the links before he went bust. My question is in two parts. The first part is how do I find out what websites are linking to me with these broken URL's, and the second is will these 404'ing links affect my SEO? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
Internal Links to Ecommerce Category Pages
Hello, I read a while back, and I can't find it now, that you want to add internal links to your main category pages. Does that still apply? If so, for a small site (100 products) what is recommended? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Benefit of using 410 gone over 404 ??
It seems like it takes Google Webmaster Tools to forever realize that some pages, well, are just gone. Truth is, the 30k plus pages in 404 errors, were due to a big site URL architecture change. I wonder, is there any benefit of using 410 GONE as a temporary measure to speed things up for this case? Or, when would you use a 410 gone? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers. One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic. And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword. The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LeverSEO
Jen Davis0 -
Partners and Customers logo listing and links
We have just created a program where we list the customers that use our software and a link to their websites on a new "Customers" page. We expect to have upwards of 100 logos with links back to their sites. I want to be sure this isn't bordering on gray or black hat link building. I think it is okay since they are actual users of our software. But there is still that slight doubt. Along these same lines, would you recommend adding a nofollow or noindex tag? Thanks for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PerriCline0
![http://i.imgur.com/yhmjs1P.jpg[/IMG][/URL]](http://i.imgur.com/yhmjs1P.jpg%5B/IMG%5D%5B/URL%5D){kind=link}