Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
-
Hey everyone,
We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario:
- We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor.
- Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed.
- Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings.
**The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients.
**The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty.
The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
-
Definitely just disavow. John Mueller from Google said in a hangout that you should not be paying for link removal unless for some reason you feel that you have inconvenienced the site owner and feel that you ought to pay for the link to be removed. In the same hangout a Google employee, Mariya said, "No! Don't pay for link removal! That's what the disavow tool is for." I've transcribed the video and given my thoughts on it here: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/should-you-pay-for-link-removal/
-
Totally agree with everyone here. I wouldn't, under any circumstance, pay for a link to be removed. I was reading a blog post written by Google the other day about it. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/new-notifications-about-inbound-links.html
Matt Cutts says in the post "In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won't take links down. If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, feel free to let us know about that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our webmaster forum or in a separate spam report. We have taken action on several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves."
Google are good at spotting these types of links and not counting them especially if there is a strong backlink profile. I'd just disavow at domain level.
-
Thanks Rand,
I appreciate the feedback. I think our approach to this issue is more clear now - we'll include some documentation to hopefully prevent others from being extorted.
-
Definitely agree with Rand. When you submit your requests, send Google a note saying that the person is trying to get you to pay to have the links removed, possibly even including the email/text that stated he wanted you to pay. I doubt it will take them long to respond. I would NOT pay the person a dime. Submitting the request via the clients webmaster account should take care of the damage.
"That still leaves the issue of returning keyword rankings back to 'normal'. I'm still wondering what effect physically removing the links (and coughing up the cash) would have versus submitting a disavow file for all low quality directories in the client's profile."
Google's disavow tool is made for this. Otherwise, a competitor could submit your site to as many bad places as they wanted, and there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. As long as you submit a complete report of all the links in question, you should be fine.
"We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick."
Ninja? More like a clown, lol.
-
Yeah, disavowing should have the same effect as if the links were removed, so you're better off submitting the disavow.
-
Hey William,
Thanks for the reply. The disavow option seems to be pretty popular from what I've gathered so far - I agree with you about the financial part of the process feeling a little extort-y.
That still leaves the issue of returning keyword rankings back to 'normal'. I'm still wondering what effect physically removing the links (and coughing up the cash) would have versus submitting a disavow file for all low quality directories in the client's profile. Presuming most of the directories have been adjusted algorithmically to provide almost no SEO value - it seems to add more points in going the disavow route.
-
I'm in agreement with William. If you proactively submit the disavow file, you should be protected. I'd also think about sending a note via Webmaster Tools to let Google know about the network and that this person is extorting you/your site by forcing payment to remove links. That may help others whom Google might penalize for this in the future if they refuse to pay (and paying it forward like that is a great way to serve the web community and discourage future spam extortionists).
-
Just disavow. Don't let people like this extort you. If you want to get him to try and remove the links for free, tell him you're not going to pay him, and instead you're going to submit a disavow, flagging his entire network to Google as unwanted links. You made a good faith effort by contacting the webmaster, but being extorted goes beyond good faith.
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
-
Is Link equity / Link Juice lost to a blocked URL in the same way that it is lost to nofollow link
Hi If there is a link on a page that goes to a URL that is blocked in robots txt - is the link juice lost in the same way as when you add nofollow to a link on a page. Any help would be most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Swiss based, USA links only
Hello, My company is based is Switzerland with a Swiss address and US number but my client are only in the USA. I only have links from US websites and no Swiss website. Can I be penalised by google for that ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
OSE provides Spam analysis for website link profile, Do Moz have a tool to check the link quality before placing a link? How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward1 -
Any success stories after removing excessive cross domain linking?
Hi, I found some excessive cross domain linking from a separate blog to the main company website. It sounds like best practice is to cut back on this, but I don't have any proof of this. I'm cautious about cutting off existing links; we removed two redundant domains that had a huge number of links pointing to the main site almost 1 year ago, but didn't see any correlated improvement in rankings or traffic per se. Hoping some people can share a success story after pruning off excessive cross linking either for their own website or for a client's. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Thousands of Links from mrwhatis.net
Google WMT shows that there are thousands of links pointing to the pages of my website from mrwhatis.net. Among the links, hundreds of them have the same anchor text. Here are some examples. http://mrwhatis.net/a-canon-in-music-for-kid.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pianomother
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-chords-piano-in-c.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-chord.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-mp3-free-downloa.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-sheet-fre.html and more.... The links pointing to my site on the above pages share the same link title "Canon In D Sheet Music | Canon In D Music Score". My question is - are these links considered unnatural links by Google based on your experience? Why and why not? I want to get some ideas before I ask Google to disavow these links. Thanks. John0 -
Linking Within Website
Hello - I have about 10 landing pages that I am focusing on ranking for and I'm doing okay. My question is should I have all these pages on a drop down menu from my home page or is the innerlinking too much? http://www.kasplacement.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ksundheim10 -
Should i remove sitemap from the mainsite at a webshop (footer link) and only submit .XML in Webmaster tools?
Case: Webshop with over 2000 products. I want to make a logical sitemap for Google to follow. What is best practice at this field? Should i remove the on-page sitemap there is in html with links (is shown as a footer link called "sitemap") and only have the domain.com/sitemap.xml ? Links for great articles about making sitemaps are appreciated to. The system is Magento, if that changes anything.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mickelp0