Why would links that were deleted by me 3 months ago still show up in reports?
-
I inadvertently created a mini link farm some time back by linking all of my parked domains (2000 plus) to some of my live websites (I was green and didn't think linking between the same owner sites / domains was an issue). These websites were doing well until Penguin and although I did not get any 'bad link' advices from Google I figure I was hit by Penguin.
So about 3 or 4 months ago I painstakingly deleted ALL links from all of those domains that I still own (only 500 or so - the others were allowed to lapse). None of those domains have any links linking out at all but old links from those domains are still showing up in WMT and in SEOmoz and every other link tracking report I have run.
So why would these links still be reported?
How long do old links stay in the internet archives? This may sound like a strange question but do links 'remain with a domain for a given period of time regardless'? Are links archived before being 'thrown out' of the web. I know Google keeps archives of data that has expired, been deleted, website closed etc, etc for about 3 years or so (?).
In an effort to correct a situation I have spent countless hours manually deleting thousands of links but they won't go away.
Looking for some insight here please.
cheers,
Mike
-
I would imagine the reason they are still showing up is a combination of the sites not being crawled often or deep enough and the delay on the updating of the links tools.
You could try getting the sites that used to link to you but no longer do re-crawled especially the pages that used to have your links on.
I believe this should see a refreshing of the links tools in time.
I hope this helps
Sean
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
-
Someone has built low quality links to my site - what should I do?
Hey guys, I was wondering whether you could offer me some help on something. One of the site's I'm working on has a blog attached to it and we sometimes accept guest posts from authors. A month or so back we published a blog that has been attracting a number of low-quality backlinks. Having looked into the matter further, it turned out that the client who had created the guest post was doing something called "tiered link building" and was building crappy links to their guest post content on other websites. I have subsequently deleted the blog post in question - will this devalue/cancel out the inbound links pointing to the original URL? Or do I need to do something extra? Disavow even? Comments appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Does Backlinks from User Profile Page Still Matter
Though, lot of algorithmic changes, updates have happened. However, backlinks from quality source or trusted sites has hardly lost its importance and thats why Open SIte Explorer or Majestic seo is still there to find quality of backlinks, trust factor and authority factor of the backlinks. I need to know does having backlink (dofollow) from Profile Page - still matters and if yes - will a do follow backlink from Moz Profile Page or any authority site or forum page, having dofollow link from user profile page - does it still count as a mark to authority of your site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
Cutting off the bad link juice
Hello, I have noticed that there is plenty of old low quality links linking to many of the landing pages. I would like to cut them off and start again. Would it be ok to do the following?: 1. create new URLs (domain is quite string and new pages are ranking good and better than the affected old landing pages) and add the old content there 2. 302 redirect old landing pages to the new ones 3. put "no index" tag on the old URLs (maybe even "no index no follow"?)or it wouldn't work? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ThinkingJuice0 -
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 -
How Would You Go About Building a Private Link Network?
Assuming you need to build a private link network from scratch, how would you go about doing it? I am not looking for some shady tactic, but rather something that would be white hat, yet will help in our SEO efforts. Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ConversionChamp0 -
Link Building: High Ranking Site vs. Relevancy
Hello, When link building, is it acceptable to link with a site that has high authority but has minimal relevancy to our site? For example, if we sell nutritional products and the link exchange would be with a site that relates to free coupons, would that work? Also, if we are publishing articles on other sites, should we also publish them on our own site? Should we add "nofollow" if we publish them in our site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | odegi0 -
Opinions Wanted: Links Can Get Your Site Penalized?
I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal. When I initially read this article, I was happy. It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again. The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz. Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue. There seems to be a few different opinions: The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued. The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility. The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor. Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about. I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point. It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that. What do you guys think? Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other? Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another? Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept? I'm curious to hear your responses.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnthonyMangia0