Asking Sites to Remove Links.. What should I say?
-
After getting some guidance from you guys here on this forum i have decided to go through my WMT backlinks and contact all the sites that I think are spammy and are linking back to me....and I will ask them to remove my links from their sites...
Can you guys please provide some guidance as to what I should say in the letter (also, anything i should definitely not say)....
Thanks for the help...
-
That's a great question and I really don't know the answer....
How would i find out? My site is still indexed, its just ranking very poorly for the keywords that most of these links used as anchor text....
-
Have you been penalised? Or are you just no longer seeing the effects of the links that google has now devalued?
-
I agree that it is a different story if you have been penalized, but I would try to find out if that is the true reason as to why you have been penalized. It very well may be ... but what else have you been doing that may have caused the problem? Have you hired anyone to get you links recently?
-
I didn't know that google was complaining about your links.
If you or someone you hired bought links, traded links or made arrangements to have links created for your site then you might try contacting those webmasters, tell them that google doesn't like the links and ask them to remove them.
Good luck.
-
Sounds like you got a penalty. In that case, you definitely want to make an effort to remove as many as possible. Document the effort you put into it. How many sites you contact for removal and how many links you have successfully removed.
This data will likely help when you file a reconsideration request.
The main problem is, spammy links are a lot harder to remove than they are to acquire. Best of luck.
-
But my rankings have dropped terribly and i got a notice in my WMT that G detected an unnatural flow of links... and within a week i went from page 1 to page 10 on my main keyword... I think i need to try and remove some of those... Do you still think it's not necessary?
-
I agree with EGOL - it is not worth the resources to remove them and most likely they are not hurting your site.These types of links will become inevitable as your site grows.
-
Lots of these types of links are simply part of the content on spammy websites. They are often produced by a robot that scrapes websites and republishes snips of their content, including links. The more popular your website becomes the more of these types of links you will acquire. In some industries there are enormous numbers of spam websites. My site has a million of these links and I am not going to do anything about it. It would cost thousands of dollars in labor just to make "an attempt" at contacting these people and I bet that the response rate will be really really low. Google knows that these sites are trash. I don't think that those links are helping or hurting very much at all.
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
-
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monkeeboy0 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Outreach - When is it important to wait vs ask for the link with the first email?
Hello, When is it appropriate to wait till the second or third email to let the person I'm outreaching to know that I want a link? Things I'm giving away: 1. Broken Link Building 2. $100 adwords traffic 3. social sharing of their URL (twitter & facebook)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0