Can You 301 Unwanted Links to Another Site?
-
I am trying to clean up my link profile, and have noticed that a I have a lot of crappy inbound links linking to some of my old pages. And those old pages have since been 301'ed to current pages.
My question is, is it worth trying to 301 those old pages, and thus those crappy links, to another website?
Would this do anything to clean up my link profile?
-
If you really would want to do something about it, I would say that you will be better off returning 404's, as it is less likely for those bad links to carry any (bad) weight if they point to non-existing pages then it is to establish a relationship between websites by 301'ing.
This assumes that you will 301 the old pages to a website not owned by you, as I don't think you would want bad links to one of your other websites. And because if you 301 the old pages to a domain not owned by you, in effect you are establishing a relationship with a total stranger who may do any number of bad things on its own, which in effect could harm you later.
But if it was up to me, I wouldn't do anything about those bad links. Just try to get new links of better quality and they will very soon outweigh the bad ones. Also, it is quite natural for any kind of website to have low quality links, so IMHO there really is no need to do anything about those old ones, just build better new ones.
-
Interesting, The only problem I can see with this is if anybody that is looking for your site will be redirected to the spam site. You might end up with a Branding issue.
Example. Say you have a children's site that sells clothes and toys. Now the spam site is an adult site. If you redirect to that site, your potential clients can be turned off to your brand.
Yes, this is an extreme case but non the less you need to determine if you are getting legit customers from your old pages that are being redirected to your new pages.
You can also just create a report and send it to Google via Google Webmaster tools. They can devalue those links and see that you are genuinely attempting to have a legit link profile.
-
HAAH!!! I love your question. I don't know what the consequences would be, but do what you have to do. 301 them back to the source, Google or your competitor.
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 avoid too many internal links in my site navigation?
Hi! I always get this notification on my pages 'Avoid Too Many Internal Links' when I run the Page Optimization Score. And this is the message I get how to fix it: Scale down the number of internal links on your page to fewer than 100, if possible. At a minimum, try to keep navigation and menu links to fewer than 100. On my website I got a desktop navigation menu and a mobile variant, so in the source this will show more internal links. If I hide those links with CSS for the view, is the problem then solved? So Does Google then see less internal links? Or does Google crawl everything? I'm curious how I can fix this double internal links issue with my navigation menu.
Technical SEO | | Tomvl
What are you guys ideas / experiences about this?0 -
Can google bots read my internal post links if they are all listed in a javascript accordian where I list my sources?
I post a JavaScript accordion drop down tab [ a collapsible content area ] at the end of all my posts. I labeled the accordion "Show Article Sources"., and when a user clicks it, then the accordion expands open and it shows all the sources I listed for my article. And this is where I post all of my articles links that I reference per each article. But I read somewhere that google crawlers can not read text in a drop down JavaScript tab. So I am wondering now if this is true because that would mean I have no internal linking SEO going on since it cant read the links? ..... if it is true, then I should remove the accordion from all my articles and some how include the links I reference in the actual body text so I can get SEO benefits from external linking similar content? If that's true, what is an aesthetic way to do this, any example links? Tips ? Thoughts ?
Technical SEO | | ianizaguirre0 -
Site splitting value of our pages with multiple variations. How can I fix this with the least impact?
Just started at a company recently, and there is a preexisting problem that I could use some help with. Somebody please tell me there is a low impact fix for this: My company's website is structured so all of the main links used on the nav are listed as .asp pages. All the canonical stuff. However, for "SEO Purposes," we have a number of similar (not exact) pages in .html on the same topic on our site. So, for example, let's say we're a bakery. The main URL, as linked in the nav, for our Chocolate Cakes, would be http://www.oursite.com/chocolate-cakes.asp. This differentiates the page from our other cake varieties, such as http://www.oursite.com/pound-cakes.asp and http://www.oursite.com/carrot-cakes.asp. Alas, fully indexed in Google with links existing only in our sitemap, we also have: http://www.oursite.com/chocolate-cakes.html http://www.oursite.com/chocolatecakes.html http://www.oursite.com/cakes-chocolate.html This seems CRAZY to me, because wouldn't this split our search results 4 ways? Am I right in assuming this is destroying the rankings of our canonical pages? I want to change this, but problem is, none of the content is the same on any of the variants, and some of these pages rank really well - albeit mostly for long tail keywords instead of the good, solid keywords we're after. So, what I'm asking you guys is: How do I burn these .html pages to the ground without completely destroying our rankings for the other keywords? I want to 301 those pages to our canonical nav URLs but, because of the wildly different content, I'm afraid that we could see a heavy drop in search traffic. Am I just being overly cautious? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | jdsnyc20 -
Site-wide links for internet bureau
Hi mozzers, We are a internet firm building several sites and webshops every month. On almost every site we build we put a link in the footer as some kind of signature of our work. (similar to artists on their painting). Those are often dofollow links to our main page. We do get several new clients of those links each year. but in seo perspective, is this a really bad thing, or do you think because its not solely for SEO purposes its ok, but its not adding any extra weight because of some domains got 10 pages with our link on it, some ecommerce stores like 7.000. I can imagen google to give the same amount of importance to the 10 or 7k site. Whats your idea on it?
Technical SEO | | kayintveen_MD
Our website is: www.microdesign.nl0 -
Unnatural links to your site--impacts links
Hi, I just recive a "nice" Massage at my WMT- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links _Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more._Did someone here came across any massage like this before?if so, any suggestion on what to so next?Whould love for some help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Should I nofollow Geo-located links on a site?
I run various sites that use Geo-location to place related links in navigation menus on a page. For example, if you land on the home page, we will see that you are in Florida and then in one of the content boxes on the page, show job listings that this site has in Florida. We also give the option to search for other jobs or use other navigation options. The idea is to try to help the user along the best we can, but ..... What opinions do persons have here on if these links should be nofollowed as GoogleBot will always see links to places in California etc. - wherever Googlebot is crawling from? Would this then be confusing as we are a site that focused on the entire US and not just California etc Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
What are the best Free Press release sites to gain free links
Hi I am trying to find some good free press release sites that allow you to have a link with your press release to help drive traffic to your site but all the ones that i have found do not have links within them. The only ones i can find where you can have links in them are paid ones. Does anyone use press release sites to gain links to their sites and if so could you let me know which ones they are please and how important you feel they are.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How is link juice passed to links that appear more than once on a given page?
For the sake of simplicity, let's say Page X has 100 links on it, and it has 100 points of link juice. Each page being linked to would essentially get 1 point of link juice. Right? Now let's say Page X links to Page Y 3 times and Page Z 5 times, and every other link only once. Does this mean that Page Y would get 3 "link juice points" and Page Z would get 5? Note: I know that the situation is much more complex than this, such as the devaluation of footer links, etc, etc, etc. However, I am interested to hear peoples take on the above scenario, assuming all else is equal.
Technical SEO | | bheard0