What would you do about dead inbound links?

[Danapollo]

Hey guys,

I recently asked a question similar to this, but wanted to spark up a bit of a discussion around it to see what everyone's feelings were on it.

The web is always changing - as we're all too aware - so links you may have obtained (by however means) let's say 2 years ago may not be 'active' now. By that I mean you may have had a link from "example_-website.com" in 2010 and now "example-_website.com" is no longer an active website - but still shows a parked domain.

The thing is... this parked domain is still cropping up in OSE, suggesting that Google may still believe there's a link there - and may not have re-crawled that site to prove otherwise.

The issue I've had with this is an SEO company built links to the sites I'm working on now (one of the sites has been penalised as a result of their link building). These links aren't 'active' anymore and when viewed on OSE, they just head straight to a parked domain with no visible (or in-source) link to my site.

What are everyone's feelings on this? What would you all do?

I'm in two minds whether to re-write a section of the website.... but I'm swaying towards creating better content and NOT re-directing the old URLs to it (just contact the decent links and ask for a change of link).

Looking forward to seeing your responses and speaking to you all!

Nick

[Danapollo]

Not too bad really - there are some links that could be questionable, but they're just from press releases (the links themselves are OK, it's the other links on the referring sites that are concerning). The only real concern I had was all these 'rubbish' links that had suddenly expired and whether that was going to have some sort of effect on the site.

My instinct was telling me that there wouldn't be an issue - but thought I would make use of the community here to see if people had experience of this!

Thanks again!

[GregFindley.co.uk]

Hi Nick,

No problems, how does the backlink profile look aside from the parked domain links mentioned?

[Danapollo]

Hi Greg,

I haven't had any webmaster tools notifications - but the ranking patterns (dropped by exactly 50 on one main keyword) suggest it might have been under review or something.

Just can't help being a tad paranoid with SEO these days! I'm working on the content side of things, and have created some more informative and detailed content for the website - it's just a case of getting it out there now and hoping people will share the content!

Cheers for the responses

[GregFindley.co.uk]

Hi Nick,

Personally I would ignore those OSE link results from sites that are now parked domains, I would assume that Google has already cached the newly parked page & as a result the link is no longer active, or that Google will be caching the parked page pretty soon. It's probably just the case that the OSE data is out of sync, and you should see those old links drop off with the next linkscape update from SEOMoz.

I would definitely create better content and focus on building better links, you should definitely be aiming for quality over quantity with your new backlinks.

With regards to redirecting old URLs/creating new content on this site, have you received any webmaster tools notifications for the domain name in question?

Greg

[RankSurge]

Google knows it's a parked domain and will discount that link in time - don't sweat about it.

I had to deal with this exact issue for a new client. Our solution - we compiled a list of all the parked domains (over 500!) and sent that to Google with a detailed account of why we felt those links should be discounted.

It took about 2 weeks from start to finish, and although those links still appear in OSE, the rankings have returned for the client.

Hope this helps - Good luck!