Deny visitors by referrer in .htaccess to clean up spammy links?

[highlyrelevant]

I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why.

Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed.

After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link.

I think there are two parts to the conversation...

1. Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site?

2. If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites.

Thoughts?

[MickEdwards]

I've thought about this idea to get rid of bad links from specific referrers.

I agree with the comments Ian has made but when it is the homepage it's not always possible to follow those steps.  Has anyone else had any experience/information?

[highlyrelevant]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the response. I agree with you that this feels wrong and I don't recommend anyone try this (unless you have a site that you don't mind using as a guinea pig).

The problem is that, if this is your home page or a strong category page with many legitimate links, rankings, ect., it will be tough to abandon the page altogether.

To follow up about the original idea, I have done some additional research and found a few mentions, though none of them exceptionally credible, of the fact that the Googlebot does not pass referrer data to the server. Can anyone confirm?

[wrttnwrd]

Ooooh, that feels all wrong.

Seems to me .htaccess would block visitors that you may want. And while Google may obey the directive, they may also misinterpret a referrer-specific directive as cloaking.

If you want to get the same effect, here's what I'd do:

1. Change the page to which the offending links point. Have it say "This page is gone, but you can get the information you want here" and make that a link to a new page.
2. Set up your server to return a 410 code when folks visit that page.
3. Set up a new page with the old page's content, so folks can click from the old to the new, but visiting bots and browsers get a 410 code and dump the page.

That will get Google to de-index the page in a hurry.

Another option: Simply add noindex, nofollow to the targeted page.

But I like the 410 option, because that should break the authority flow and has the best chance of giving Google what it wants, short of removing the link.