Paid Links - remove, report or leave? And how to remove?
-
Bit of an unusual one for me - appreciate your thoughts...
I did an SEO audit for a potential client last week and discovered that 3 of their top 10 strongest inbound links (reported from OSE) are blatantly paid links from those "Link Bid Directories".
The links were created mid-last year, so reasonably recent.
Strange thing is that they have been using a highly reputable SEO agency for several years who do NOT engage in link buying - so I'm pretty sure it is not their SEO agency buying these links. Also - the link anchor texts are the company name - not a target keyword - so I suspect they either:
a) have someone internally in the company who thinks they are "helping" by buying links - or,
b) in my most paranoid fantasies, a competitor is setting them up for a Google smack (very long bow, I know!)
Anyway my questions are:
- If I decide to take on this client, should I DO anything about these links?
These link are almost certainly currently "working" to pass link juice and I don't believe the site has been penalised (yet!) for them. I suspect when these links are switched off, the site will drop in rankings so my thoughts are to just ignore them and proceed with a normal link building campaign in the hope that if (when) the links are killed we will be OK.
-
Is there a "safe" way to report them to Google? By which I mean, let Google know to ignore these links and NOT penalise US for them being there.
-
Is there a way to get the links removed given that we don't control the accounts that created them?
Oh - and feel free to comment on my paranoid fantasies
Have you ever seen paid links appear that you KNOW didn't come from you?
Thanks!
Steve
-
Thanks David, Monica and Lewis for your responses - I appreciate your thoughts - and I love how you all so consistently started your responses with "stop worrying" - you're right of course!
I have communicated my discovery to the client and my intended course of action was pretty much as David suggests - run fast and bury those links in a sea of press releases and other high quality organic link-building.
Still scratching my head as to where the links came from - but I need to stop worry about that don't I?
Thanks again!
-
As David says I wouldn't worry too much and Monica makes a good point about communicating this to the client.
Tell the client that your comprehensive audit spotted this potential issue and that you have a recommended course of action to rectify it.
-
Yes, David is right, stop worrying so much.
It's only three links. I would be very frank with this client and let them know of the situation, however, but explain how you plan on addressing it by organically creating better links that will pretty much bury any red flags. Any communication you can provide is he best course of action for a healthy client relationship, in my opinion. And if something does happen, there are no surprises. Unfortunately, if the client feels you need to address these links, the only thing you can do is reach out to the sites where the links appear and ask directly to remove them. Good luck!
-
First, stop worrying. It's not that easy to get someone slapped for paid links. Chances are, Google isn't even aware. I doubt the client is the size or notieriety of JC Penney
Second, start link building heavily and getting a large diversification of links.
Third, you need to do some high quality link building and get organic links from better sources. Bury these top 3 links in a sea of even higher quality links that are organic and I guarantee it wont affect a thing.
Get some press releases out there with PRWeb and get some links from large media outlets, should easily replace those links!
Good luck.
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
-
If I disavow bad links on "disavow link webmaster" will they still show up on my moz reports?
We recently found out we have a lot of bad links linking back to our website from spam sites, I disavowed them through the google disavow link webmaster. On my moz report it still shows the links, is that normal?
Link Building | | Ryan.Cruz0 -
Back link from site with DA of 72 to a website domain. Clicking on the link redirects to our website not the attended one.
Hi,
Link Building | | JIMBO16
I've ran a back link check and discovered a good back link to a site which then gets redirected back to my company's website. I have a feeling that an old SEO agency has purchased a small website which has a decent link back from a relevant organisation with a high Domain authority and then redirects the domain to our website to get the link juice. What are your thought on this? Is this really bad practise and possibly damaging? Thanks, Jim0 -
Paid Directory Links
To my surprise, I couldn't find a clear answer to the questions "Do paid directory links violate Google guidelines?" I know Matt Cutt's recently had a video on paid links, but it didn't really cover paid directory links. Are well-curated directory sites that charge for inclusion violate Google's guidelines? A good example would be the business.com directory.
Link Building | | RickyShockley0 -
Drop in Rankings After Removing Links
So I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
Remove comments or leave them be?
We're finding a lot of comments that were posted by a previous company - they've been using a keyword as the comment name (UGH) and then the comments are usually generic, like "great information, will definitely be back to read more form you" - you guys know what I mean... Now, this site is ranking well and so are the keywords. My question is, should we work on removing those comments or just leave them be and now moving forward, use the proper process - since we are doing this ourselves now.
Link Building | | Freelancer130 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
So I ran into a site that was not ranking 4 days ago and has over 2 million links to it on some keywords. My guess is this is a link bomb, but the issue is this is pushing one of my sites down. Does anyone know a good way to over come a bomb like this?
So I ran http://www.riogrande.com/ into this site not that long ago and wanted to see if any other SEO's have an opinion on it. I've seen a Google bomb before, but the amount of links going into this URL is insane. The thing is how does one over come a Google Bomb? Do you just wait to see what Google does or do you just hope to rank under that URL? I should also note that it appears that all the keywords to it are relevant to the sites content. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks
Link Building | | kateG12980