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!
-
If you've deleted the URL, you'll be in good shape. A gazzilion links to a non existing URL won't do anything to the domain that URL is on-figuratively speaking. If you 301'd that url with all those spammy back link to the the site that belonged to the owner of that post, they'd might have to come crawling back to you in the hope of getting the 301 removed. Not sure I would highly recommend that though.
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 it OK to Leave Links in Comments ?
It may sound silly ... Just wondering to see your opinion about leaving link on blogs; keyword as name with site link or link in the comment text as long as its relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mustansar0 -
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Should we remove our "index" pages (alphabetical link list to all of the products on the site)?
We run an e-commerce site with a large number of product families, with each family having a number of products within it. We have a set of pages (26 - one for each letter A-Z) that are lists of links to the product family pages. We originally created these pages thinking it would aid in discoverability of these pages to search engines, of course as time has gone on, techniques like this have fallen out of favor with Google as it provides negligible value to the user. Should we consider removing these pages from the site overall? Is it possible that it could be viewed by Panda as resembling a link farm? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI1 -
Can links from an old site raise DA for other site? Or just unethical?
So this may be an odd question. So a competing company went out of business. Their domain name is now available. So just for research purposes, would you ever or would it be unethical for a person to buy an expired competing domain name, and point it to another site to collect their link juice? The site was only a DA of 10, but not sure if one - its bad to buy a competing companies expired domain - and two - even though in the same industry, this would be bad to point it to another site or create a site from it. Just curious your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | asbchris0 -
Is it still considered reciprocal linking if one of the links has a nofollow tag?
I have a popular website in which I include nofollow links to many local businesses, like restaurants and retailers. Many of the businesses are local startups that are more focused on word of mouth and often have no idea what SEO is. Seeing as I am already mentioning them on my website and my readers are finding them via the links, I want to reach out to these businesses to see me if they might give me a link since I have been linking to them for years. My question is: If these business owners decide to link to my wesbite and they give me a 'followed' link, will this look like reciprocal linking in the eyes of search engines? In other words, does the nofollow tag I put on my links to other businesses negate the reciprocal link penalty since both parties are not benefiting from a link juice exchange?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrewHill0 -
competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority
According to my recent SEOmoz links analysis, my competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority... e.g. wedding site linking to a transportation attorney's website. Aother competitor site has an overall of 2 million links, most of which are seemingly questionable index sites or forums to which registration is unattainable. I recently created a 301 redirect, and my external links have yet to be updated to my new domain name in SEOmoz. Yet, by comparing my previous domain authority rank with those of the said competitor sites, the “delta” is relatively marginal. The SEOmoz rank is 21 whereas the SEOmoz ranks of two competitor sites 30 and 33 respectively. The problem is, however, is to secure a good SERP for the most relevant terms with Google… My Google pagerank was “3” prior to the 301 redirect. I worked quite intensively so as to receive a pagerank only to discover that it had no affect at all on the SERP. Therefore, I took a calculated risk in changing to a domain name that translates from non-latin characters, as the site age is marginal, and my educated guess is that the PR should rebound within 4 weeks, however, I would like to know as to whether there is a way to transfer the pagerank to the new domain… Does anyone have any insight as to how to go about and handling this issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eranariel0 -
Retail Site and Internal Linking Best Practices
I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc. It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages. I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions"). What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products? Any help is greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
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