How do I go about removing low authority, crappy, backlinks?
-
How do I go about getting rubbish backlinks on a clients websites removed? The links were created by a previous companies link building campaign, and I believe this (along with a few other things) could be the reason for their poor SERP's as they are an established website.
Can I alert Google and get them to discredit the links, or do I manually have to try to make contact with the owners/webmasters of the websites to get the links removed?
All help appreciated!
Thanks
-
Last time this happened, I identified the SEO agency, got some advice from a specialist lawyer, and then issued a take-down request in the strongest terms (though with bad backlinks being replaced with good backlinks). It worked.
-
Justin,
I'd also like to suggest that instead of trying to get the low quality links removed, it will be a better option to try and obtain higher quality links.
Manoj
-
Hi Justin, I take it that you've not had any other signs that you've been penalised. You've not received any warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools or had the clients pages vanish from the search results completely? They still have pages in the index?
You mention that you're trying to recover from a previous companies link-building activity. How much information do you have to work with?
Do you have any historic ranking reports? Do you know how the rankings have changed and when? Can you find out what the position was before they started their link building and how it's changed over time?
Can you establish how badly your client has been affected? Do you have access to the site's analytics? Can you see/quantify any sudden loss of search traffic etc?
Personally I'd start by taking a good look at the SERPS for the chosen keywords and seeing how strongly your clients pages are likely going to compete.
In your view, with a cynical SEO eye, do the pages deserve to rank higher than the competition?
How would your client react if you put their page and a competitors ranking page side by site and asked them to say honestly which one was best? (I don't recommend that you do this unless you know how they'll respond!!)
-
Hi Caroline. My guess would be that they're not being directly penalised, but are suffering because their inbound links are coming from what Google sees as low ranking, low-quality, low value-add sites such as, but not always, content farms etc.
If you suspect this to be the case it's really important to look beyond the headline "linking root domains" number and look at the domain/page authority of those linking domains.
If you were trying to differentiate good content from bad - would you look at the number of votes, or the number of votes from respected sources? (Espectially when you know that people are trying to game the system by building lots of "easy" low quality links.)
This is of course just my opinion. I'd love to know if there any evidence for actually "link penalties".
-
@doug
Thanks for the quick answer, I think that @caroline's point/question is also of main concern. I am happy to leave the links as long as I can dilute their (potentially negative) effects by gaining quality, authority links, but I would expect from the first Panda update, that backlinks from link farms/directories would carry no authority and therefore would have little to no effect on the website that they were linking to.
-
Doug could I ask you a question?
I've noticed that in the last few months people have attributed their decrease in the rankings to 'being penalised for bad links'.
It is the case that they were previously gaining benefits from those links and that with the recent changes these links go back to 0 influence, reducing their rankings to what they previously were, as opposed to the links having a negative impact on their sites?
-
You won't get Google to do anything about them, but Google have said that "crappy backlinks" won't hurt you, they just won't be worth much anything.
(Backlinks obtained in an underhand unethical manner might though...)
If you really want to get the links removed you'd need to contact the individual webmasters. This is likely to take lots of time/effort that you're almost certainly better off spending doing some high-quality link building or content creation.
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
-
How can I track where visitors go after exiting my website?
I don't want to track external links. I just want to know where they go when they leave. Is that possible? Can I do this with a cookie?
Competitive Research | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there. I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12. And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes. It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least. So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful. I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess. We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
Competitive Research | | harrybingham0 -
How can I project changes to Page Authority?
Lets say I have a PA 50 website, and I just got a PA 60 link from another site. Is there any way to project, mathematically, what that new link will do to my page's authority? Would the formula look something like this? New PA = Current Page PA + ((New Link PA*dampening factor)/Total number of links on new page) In the absence of a mathematical model to predict shifts in PA, how can you be confident that a specific action will help you progress towards an authority objective?
Competitive Research | | phantom0 -
Why would a site with virtually no external links and low authority rank very high?
Hey there: I'm not sure anyone's going to be game to answer this but... I have designed, done on-page optimization for and done ongoing content marketing and linkbuilding for a local fitness site. The site is about nine months old and I am attempting to achieve rank for the keyword "personal trainers in philadelphia." We've made progress; having taken a new site from +100 to 19 in about four or five months worth of content creation and linkbuilding on a very modest budget. I'm not complaining. What has me confused though is that there are one or two sites that are ranking very high for this keyword string with considerably shoddier metrics than our site and I'm wondering how a stock WP theme site with very few inbound links can rank top five for a reasonably competitive keyword? Our site is http://vtrainersinc.com. The site I've noticed that ranks top five and seems to have an inferior SEOMoz profile is bodycrafters.net. Anybody got any ideas as to why these things seem to occur? I have this feeling this site has stumbled upon a magic SEO elixir which I'd like to get my hands on!
Competitive Research | | splatdude0 -
The starter crawl is going on 2 days and no results
Does the starter crawl work in the first 30 days? Mine has been going 2 days and still no results, has finished yet??
Competitive Research | | WalterW0 -
"Linking Root Domains" Authority 100 ?
In All of my competiitors appears Wordpress.com, google.com, w3.org, yahoo.com and all of them have Domain Auth. 100. How is it possible? And how can in get links from domains like thath.
Competitive Research | | pageup5550 -
Why are links not being added to my Domain Authority
I have just compared my domain authority with competitors and I can see that they are outscoring me on links from YouTube etc. Even though I have same set-up with regard YouTube and Squidoo etc and am also featured on Dmoz... these are not being added to my domain authority. Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | manedog0 -
Domain Authority Question
So in looking at my first campaign with 3 of my top competitors, I have a domain authority of 65, and my competitors are 31, 43, and 38 and yet all of them outrank me by quite a bit. How can I take this research and make some sense of it to beat them in rankings? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | azguy0