Should I Remove Thousands of Bad Links over a Short Time or Long Time?
-
Hey Moz Community!
I've got a website that has hundreds of thousands of old links that don't really offer any great content. They need to be removed. Would it be a better idea to remove them in batches of 5000,10000, or more over a long time... or remove them all at the same time because it doesn't matter?
Cheers,
Alex
-
Hi Alex,
When it comes to bad links pointing to your site, definitely remove them as an when you can (i.e. immediately, acknowledging that it will take time to contact every linking webmaster and negotiate the link removal). If you are going to suffer any ill effects in rankings from removing bad links (which does happen if Google was passing PageRank through those links), it's still best to get this done sooner rather than later. What you do not want is bad links that haven't been noticed to suddenly be picked up upon, resulting in a manual penalty.
-
Drop them like they are hot.
-
I'm with William on this. There is nothing to be gained by undertaking this slowly. Matt Cutts said in a video that if you have a lot of bad links, or don't really know where links came from, then just disavow them. Google are realistic as well and know that you can't be expected to contact thousands of domain owners.
But do make sure they are bad - I have seen disavow files sent to me to look over, only to find that some links were actually really good.
-Andy
-
If you know for sure they are all bad links, then do it all at once and get it done with. Maybe you'll see an increase in traffic.
Once you disavow something, you're not likely to get it back, so keep that in mind. From the sounds of it, these links are obviously bad, so you shouldn't have to worry.
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
-
No follow links on a blog
Hi On our blog, we have a section called 'Tags'. I have just noticed that these links are all "no follow" links. The tags section does appear on every single page on the blog - is this recommend to have them as 'no follow' links or should I get our developer to change them. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
URL removals
Hello there, I found out that some pages of the site have two different URL's pointing at the same page generating duplicate content, title and description. Is there a way to block one of them? cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
OUTGOING LINK ISSUES
NO LINK TO HOME MY WEBSIDE PROFITIOK.COM FOR EXAMPLE YOU SEE THE PAGE I HAVE CHANGE TWO DAYS BACK PREVIOUS
Technical SEO | | Luckykhullar
ABOUT US - Profitok.com 2 DAYS BACK I CHANGED THE TITLE title>Commodity tips | Mcx TIPS | Mcx Daily Tips |Mcx Good tips Provider BUT WHEN I CHECKING IT IS NOT UPDATED THIS TITLE DEAR SIR CAN Y GIVE ME THE CORRECT ANSWER0 -
SEO Disasters - Links to Stories of Site Moves/Rebuilds Gone Bad?
Hello, everyone.. I am looking for some links to stories, articles, what have you describing medium to large complex sites that have moved, changed CMS, changed domains, etc, and ended up in a total SEO disaster. Really appreciate anything the community here has or can find! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DuPont0 -
Added data to links
Hello I am in the process of cleaning a site and getting less pages cached. it is a magento site and I was wondering what is your advice fo pages that get this padded to the link ?material=139&price=10%2C12 accept the obvious canonical? thanks
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
I have been Hit with UNWANTED Links and I need to know how to remove them?
I have been looking at Google Webmasters Tools and saw that suddenly I have this huge amount of links form an unknown source “SiteLoki” never heard of it? Didn’t want it! Need to get rid of it!
Technical SEO | | rdominey
My Website www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com experienced a sudden and dramatic loss of presence on Google about three weeks ago. I first thought it was something to do with the new Google Algorithm. I also contacted Google to be re-evaluated. They replied:
Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions foundMay 10, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality Team I have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
There was another post regarding canonical tag issues; resolved, I removed all canonical tags for now. Today I discovered the links and I suspect that having even
1 link for this website will penalize you in Google. Here are some Webmaster Tools pages for reference: I also noted that the image for the link is from an old site hosted on www.Globat.com. I don't know what that significance might be. I left them in January. Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can offer, Ray Webmaster-Tools-Query_Your-Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photos-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki_links.jpg0 -
How long should I keep 301 redirects?
I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards0 -
External Links on a Front Page
Does anyone have any links to information about external links on a front page ? I am advising a client that this is not the best idea and that they could be put in a different place but can't find any proof of this.
Technical SEO | | marcelo-2753980