Best way to clean up a nasty backlink profile?
-
A new client of mine sadly has a TON of terrible links (3800 links from 1500 domains) which are pointing to landing pages that have been created specifically for manipulating engines. Besides contacting these sites and asking to have the links removed the only solution I can think of it to delete these pages and let them 404. Obviously I am not thrilled about that but I'm not sure what else to do. Does anyone have any other ideas for how to clean up this backlink profile? Thanks
-
Thank you everyone for the comments and confirmation. Now I just have to break the news to the client that we are going to have to delete those pages haha. Wish me luck
-
Definitely remove the pages from the server and 404 them, you are lucky they linked to internal pages and not the homepage or you would have many many hours of reaching out to webmasters on your hands.
This is a simple fix. and 404s are ok if the 404's are not a result of dead links pointing to no longer existing pages on your site. external sites 404ing to you is fine.
-
No, 404 errors are a natural part of the Internet.
-
If you have 404 errors when Google crawls your site does this not also impact your rankings?
-
Nakul,
Thank you for clarifying this question. We are also in the same situation. It is so good to have someone in the field to offer advice.
-
Honestly, I think you gut is telling you the right thing. And thankfully you answered the question yourself.
The fact that those pages were created to manipulate rankings (as in doorway pages?)
If that's the case, and there are external links to those pages, I would do exactly what you are thinking. Delete those pages and let them be a 404.
Did your client also receive the unnatural links google penalty notice ? If that's the case, then it's a no brainer to do this right away. You could also try to find if there are link networks involved and if there are certain webmasters who control multiple website specially when you say 3800 links from 1500 domains. I would atleast try to get "some" of them removed or atleast have some effort. If there's a way to send a blanket email to all of the 1500 domains, it's well worth the effort of atleast trying.
I hope this helps.
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
-
What's the best way of crawling my entire site to get a list of NoFollow links?
Hi all, hope somebody can help. I want to crawl my site to export an audit showing: All nofollow links (what links, from which pages) All external links broken down by follow/nofollow. I had thought Moz would do it, but that's not in Crawl info. So I thought Screaming Frog would do it, but unless I'm not looking in the right place, that only seems to provide this information if you manually click down each link and view "Inlinks" details. Surely this must be easy?! Hope someone can nudge me in the right direction... Thanks....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
Backlink audit - anyone know of a good tool for manually checking backlinks?
Hi all, I'm looking at how to handle backlinks on a site, and am seeking a tool into which I can manually paste backlinks - is there a good backlink audit tool that offers this functionality? Please let me know! Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
How to best add affiliate links in a way that minimizes panda risk?
We have a site of about 100.000 pages that is getting several million of visitors per year via organic search. We plan to add about 50.000 new pages gradually in the next couple of months and would like to add affiliate links to the new pages. All these 50.000 new pages will have unique quality data that a team has been researching for a while. I would like to add in the area under the fold or towards the end of the pages in an unobstrusive way affiliate links to about 5 different affiliate programs with affiliate links customized to page content and of real value to visitors. Since affiliate links are one of the factors that may trigger panda I am a bit nervous whether we should add the affiliate links and if there is any way of implementing the affiliate links in a way that they may be less likely to trigger panda. E.g. would you consider hiding affiliate links from google by linking to intermediate URL (which I would mark as noindex nofolllow) on our domain which then redirects to the final affiliate landing page (but google may notice via chrome or android data) ? Any other idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Whats the Best way to Protect Wordpress Website from Getting Hacked.
Hi All, I just like to know whats the best way to protect wordpress website for getting hacked. I tried using Wordfence but nothing much happened. I m in shared Host and when ever there is a sign of attack my hosting company takes the site off which affects my site ranking a lot. I m trying to keep all my plugins updated but still it happens . Like to know what other people do . I am open for Paid tool suggestion as well. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Should I switch all paid-for directory backlinks to nofollow backlinks?
Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c), established for over 8 years. They're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow backlinks, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Perhaps I should only implement this change gradually? Thanks in advance, Luke Edited 30 minutes ago by Luke Rowland
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
What is the best way to handle special characters in URLs
What is the best way to handle special characters? We have some URL's that use special characters and when a sitemap is generate using Xenu it changes the characters to something different. Do we need to have physically change the URL back to display the correct character? Example: URL: http://petstreetmall.com/Feeding-&-Watering/361.html Sitmap Link: http://www.petstreetmall.com/Feeding-%26-Watering/361.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850