I am cleaning up a clients link profile and am coming across a lot of directories (no surprise) My question is if an obvious fre for all generic directory doesn't look to have been hit by any updates is it a wise move recommending tit for removal?
-
I am cleaning up a clients link profile and am coming across a lot of directories (no surprise)
My question is, if an obvious free for all generic directory doesn't look to have been hit by any updates is it a wise move recommending it for removal on the basis that it is a free for all directory and could be hit in teh future?
-
I agree with Mark Scully on this one, but would like to add some thoughts:
If you are looking to clean out your backlink profile you should go about it in a very methodical fashion. I would recommend exporting the links to an Excel file and then, in a new sheet, start skimming and categorizing them -needs more research; relevant; potentially harmful; show stopper. It will be time consuming but once you have a basic categorization set you can start reaching out.
There is a real possibility that many of the directory links are from neglected and orphaned directories and that the contact e-mail may not be in operation anymore. When you find this to be the case, note it on your categorized Excel sheet. Note the date you sent the link removal request and note the response; if there is no response, note that as well. Be realistic concerning the expected reply time (this is a big deal to you; it is probably not a big deal to those hosting the directories) and send out second and third requests.
If it was me, I would concentrate on the two most harmful categories and give them a real thorough going through. After a few weeks (I know, it's a long-ish project) you should have a nice detailed actions-taken report and should feel comfortable utilizing the disavow links tool if needed.
Note: This tool, from what I understand, is not a click-and-fix and you will need to have a file of the links you would like disavowed to upload to Google for review. Barry Schwartz, over at seroundtable.com, has a nice post concerning this and he supplies an example of what a disavow report might look like:
Watch the video by Matt Cutts explaining the tool and use it with caution and only as a last resort; don't spam them with reports.
One final note: Some of these links may not be harming you as of now. Use your best judgement and ask yourself this question: "if I knew another penguin update was coming tomorrow, would having this link cause me to worry?" It isn't always a straightforward answer, but if you find yourself stretching and searching for a rational to view the link as relevant or user-centric, then it probably isn't.
I am sure there is plenty more to say on the topic, and I hope some others chime in with their thoughts. It's time to earn that paycheck.
Keep us posted, and happy digging.
-
Good point Mark that seems a much safer approach.
-
Hi Mark,
Just to clarify, the complete number of backlinks to their site is 13500? I would be quite cautious about deleting 90% of them. I'm sure some of them stand out as more toxic than others. It would be worth focusing on them first.
I know a lot of people have mixed opinions about link cleanup (whether it should be done or not) but if you managed to delete even half of the poor quality links to the site, it should be a clear enough message to Google that you're taking the warning seriously.
If a re-inclusion request fails, you could go deeper then.
-
Hi Mark
Thats kind of what I am thinking. I am going through 13500 links at the moment and it is killing me. Seeing directory after directory is very painful.
Upto now im looking at killing around 90% of the links for this particluar client as they are made up from these types of directories.
Althoughs ome of them still show very high DA and PA aswell as high TBPR in my heart I can't see how they could possibly add value to a users experience as I can't see why anybody would use them to find anything. Everybody knows that these types of directories exist for the sole purpose of obtaining links so surely it would make sense to kill the link even if it is helping at the minute?
-
Hi Mark,
I've had to do a lot of backlink analysis and removal before so this is my view.
If the directory lists links in an unnatural looking manner (i.e. just a long list with little text about the link), I would remove it. Some directories have managed to avoid any algorithm updates for now but I'm sure they will eventually get hit.
The volume of link removal you do will really depend on how large your back link profile is. I had to work through about 20,000 links which needed to be removed as they were from low quality article sites and directories. We received the unnatural link warning in GWMT and filed a re-inclusion request. This got turned down and so we had to dig even deeper into the links pointing to our site.
Just be consious of how many 'good' links you do have. If you go straight into removing a lot of directory links and leave yourself with very few 'good' links to your site, it could be an issue for you. It's really your call.
Personally, I'd remove them if the directory looks poor, has no social media presence and looks spammy.
-
Personally, if a site has been hit with a warning, then I would go through and remove everything that isn't a decent link back and I would be targeting directories as well - but this wouldn't be a complete removal - I would need to look at each first. Saying that, if I see www.greatbigdirectory4u.com, then this sort get immediate removal.
I'm not saying that every directory is a waste, because some can offer value - have a look at www.seomoz.org/directories as an example of decent ones.
Andy
-
Site has been hit witha link warning.
Removing manually first off anyway. Disavow last resort from our end.
Nothing in the pipline but have noticed a lot of directories have been hit recently so I am guessing it will happen at some stage.
I am also expecting a few different views on this but would be nice to hear them. Whats your stance Andy would you kill or leave?
-
You are likely to get different feelings on this Mark.
However, are you thinking about using the disavow tool? If so, only do so if the client has been hit with a link warning. If not, and you just want to get rid of directories, then I would try and remove listings through direct contact.
As for FFA directories getting a hit in the future, I haven't seen Google state this could happen (unless I have missed something).
Andy
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: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
I'm getting an error in Search Console that pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. Unfortunately I can't post images on here but I've linked some url's below. The page below in search console shows the error above... https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/ As does this one. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/independent-school-marketing-communications/ However, this page does not have the error and is indexed by Google. The meta robots tag looks identical. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/blog/leadership-team/jill-goodman/ Any and all help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
What to do with 404 errors when you don't have a similar new page to 301 to ??
Hi If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate page errors from pages don't even exist
Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated
Technical SEO | | mmoezzi0 -
My webmaster doesn't shows backlinks data why???
Hi every one I have 2 websites with same domain with targeting different country name for example www.domain.com.au and the other is wwww.domain.co.nz . So my question is that in webmaster tool my one domain doesn't shows back links data or search query data. why this is happen?
Technical SEO | | SanketPatel0 -
Removing links from another site
Hello, Some site that I have never been able to access as it is always down has over 3,000 links to my website. They disappeared the other week and our search queries dramatically improved but now they are back again in Google Webmaster and we have dropped again.I have contacted the site owner and got no response and I have also put in a removal form (though I am not sure this fits for that) and asked Google to remove as they have been duplicating our content also. It was in my pending section but has now disappeared.This links are really damaging our search and the site isnt even there. Do I have to list all 3,000 links in the link removal to Google or is there another way I can go about telling them the issue.Appreciate any help on this
Technical SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
Sitemap for pages that aren't on menus
I have a site that has pages that has a large number, about 3,000, pages that have static URLs, but no internal links and are not connected to the menu. The pages are pulled up through a user-initiated selection process that builds the URL as they make their selections, but,as I said, the pages already exist with static URLs. The question: should the sitemap for this site include these 3,000 static URLs? There is very little opportunity to optimize the pages in any serious kind of way, if you feel that makes a difference. There is also no chance that a crawler is going to find its way to these pages through the natural flow of the site. There isn't a single link to any of these pages anywhere on the site. Help?
Technical SEO | | RockitSEO0 -
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 -
Removing a site from Google's index
We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?
Technical SEO | | issuebasedmedia0