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 -
Is it possible to create "hidden" backlinks?
Don't miss interpret this... I DON'T mean hidden backlinks that you would stick on a page using html/css. What I am trying to figure out is if it's possible to create backlinks from sites that aren't visible by crawlers or SEO tools like Moz?... Does that make sense? Another words, let's say I place a visible/genuine/follow backlink to any external website from my blog. Is there a way to keep crawlers like Moz or other SEO tools from "seeing it"?
Competitive Research | | co.mc0 -
So What's Up With Those Crappy Search Results?
I used to rank for some keywords now I've been outranked by crappy websites. But what amazes me most is that among the top 10 results for a particular keyphrase, 3 of these results point to websites that are no longer online! Worst than that, these websites have to backlinks! So how come 404 pages / non-existing websites rank higher than I do? Is Google loosing it or are they trying to create so much confusion in the hope that website owners will turn to Adwords?
Competitive Research | | sbrault740 -
Ranking and Domain/Page Authority
I'm not seeing a very good correlation between ranking and domain/page authority. Am I missing something here? ie., 2nd raning at 1/0. Also seeing competitor as "12" domain authority in "competitive domain analysis", but shows much higher here for same competitor? <colgroup><col width="94"> <col width="171"> <col width="108"></colgroup>
Competitive Research | | delphia
| Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority |
| 70 | 40 | 83 |
| 1 | 0 | 41 |
| 51 | 3 | 97 |
| 34 | 5 | 36 |
| 41 | 3 | 52 |
| 23 | 1 | 59 |
| 59 | 49 | 100 |
| 48 | 2 | 100 |
| 52 | 6 | 77 |
| 27 | 2 | 14 |
| 1 | 0 | 57 |
| 15 | 1 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 24 | 1 | 57 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 21 | 1 | 36 |1 -
Free tools to find country of origin of backlinks/urls
Hey are there any free tools out there which can allow me to insert a large list of urls, and it determines the country of origin of the domain. I know the paid version of majestic does, but i was wondering if theres any free tools? Cheers, Chris
Competitive Research | | monster990 -
Determining why an established competitor's rankings have bombed - What's the best way to go about it?
I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages. I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too. **What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? ** I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No? Thanks guys
Competitive Research | | Martin_S0 -
Should I move my brand under our corporate domain to boost Domain Authority?
Dear Community, I am seeking your expert advice on this situation: We have these assets as a starting point: a long-existing and well-linked Corporate Website (CW) with good metrics, a Brand Website (BW) with low/medium metrics, and some Brand Competitor (BC) websites with very similar metrics to BW. We will launch a new version of BW very soon with a well SEOd structure and copy (the old one was not SEOd at all) which I hope itself will bring SERP advantages. My dilemma emerged after checking the domain level values of our Corporate Website: CW / BW / BCs Domain Authority: 48 / 28 / 24-27 Domain mozRank: 4.79 / 3.15 / 2.6-3.25 Domain mozTrust: 4.73 / 2.79 / 2.47-3.06 My understanding is that based on seoMoz consensus domain level values give about 1/4th of the total pie. Based on these what do you think I should to win over competitors rankings? Should I keep running the service under BW (in an neighborhood with nearly identically valued competitors) Should I redirect BW to a sub-folder of the Corporate Website? (e.g.www.corporate.com/brand) with 301 redirects and enjoy the advantages of the much better domain values Alternatively, I could also build valuable and keyword-optimized content under our CW linking back to our BW. My understanding is that Option 1 has the least advantages among the three. Option 2 and 3 compete with the following advantages: Option 2: We could quickly rank higher as domain values elevate us from the mediocre BW and BC values (offsetting a little loss on 301 redirects) Option 3 would allow us to occuppy more positions for the important keywords on SERPs thus attract more "deep-browsing" visitors (and possibly BW could also get some advantages by receiving links from CW) Which direction would you proceed from here? Cheers, Andrew
Competitive Research | | andrew12120 -
Researching Backlinks from Distinct C-Classes
I'm looking to do some competitive research on the top ranking sites in my niche. How can I get a list of the number of backlinks that come from distinct C-Class IP addresses? I don't see this anywhere in the OSE data. Thanks.
Competitive Research | | stevenmusumeche0