Dirty Link Profile - Suggestions?
-
Ok, so I was just hired to do SEO for a company and so I did a backlink analysis. As it turns out, they've got a pretty dirty link profile - footer links, white on white links, unrelated links, tiny font links, links from penalized sites, hardly any branded links... you get it.
I was thinking about taking the worst of the worst links, removing them and leaving the rest, just to clean it up a little. I don't want them to get penalized.... but... I don't want their rankings to drop either.
Think I should leave them all and just start building relevant, branded links?
OR
Clean up the whole link profile?
OR
Just clean it up a little?
-
I have heard multiple reports recently of spammy backlinks hurting a site. Seems Google is more willing to penalize a site for bad linking practices.
-
To follow up on this, the backlinks were in fact hurting rankings. We removed some paid backlinks and immediately saw large increases in rankings. I hope this helps someone else.
When I asked this question I really did not believe that removing backlinks would improve rankings, but it did.
Thanks!
-
If the bad links are not currently hurting then I wouldn't worry too much about them hurting them in the future. I would advise the owner of the site of what you have found, explain the risks, and then offer him your advice. Not that you are excusing yourself if you advise them poorly, but knowing the risks upfront makes it easier if something does go wrong later.
-
I would just leave the old links and start building new, good links.
I would double-check that their site is clean and remove anything poor, though.
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
-
Disavow links from legit sites but have spammy link profiles?
I'm currently doing a backlink audit for our site with a LOT of backlinks. Some of the linking sites are legitimate business websites in our industry who have linked to us for a totally legitimate reason (we have good content!). However, these businesses themselves have a spammy backlink profile—that is, the only sites linking to that site are obvious link farm sites. Here is an illustration: spammyseolinks.com; payforseo.xyz; blackhat.ru ==all link to==> legitbusiness.com ==links to==> mysite.com Should I disavow this backlink? I guess it's not really giving me much SEO worth since it surely been branded a spammy junk domain, but then again, it's a real website that we've earned a link from because we're doing stuff the right way. Is it hurting or helping me?
Link Building | | THandorf0 -
Have any suggestions for next steps in link building campaign?
We are conducting SEO and white-hat link building campaign for a client that is in the national (US) fertility/infertility niche. So far we've done outreach to potential websites that we found to be a good fit for the campaign, although the conversion rate for getting Guest Posts, even Sponsored Posts is quite low. Furthermore, the number of these potential websites is close to running out and it's getting harder to find other websites with relevant metrics that are outreach-worthy. Besides Guest Post/Sponsored Post outreach, we've done Link Reclamation, Resource Links and Broken Link Building. Also, we tried expanding the list of keywords to try and come up with some new leads (in sub-niches) but haven't had much success. One peculiar thing that is happening when we do start a communication with the blog/website owners is that they get interested in the topic at first, up to the point of asking us to send them a Guest Post article and then.. silence, no response from them. We do a couple of follow-ups, but in most cases we don't hear back from them. We realize that there could be some editorial changes that they might want to be done, which we would be willing to do, but they just simply do not respond at all. When talking to other people in the SEO business we get different opinions on how to proceed, ranging from creation of web 2.0 properties and linking them up with video content and the client website, to even creating SEO link wheels. We are quite committed to our client and would love to get their site ranking, but we're reluctant to use tactics that might yield only short term results and might end up hurting the rankings on the long run. Other part of our strategy is creating quality content on our client's blog (within their website) and doing outreach to bloggers to get them interested in the topics that we are covering. So far these efforts have also not been very successful. Basically, my question is when you are doing a link building campaign for a client, what is your next strategy when the link opportunities run out?
Link Building | | Ullamalm0 -
Spammy Links in MOZ but when I go to the external link I can't find a link to us
I was going to try to contact webmasters to see if they would remove some of our spammy links. I see alot of them in MOZ but when you go to the site our anchor text is not there. Is this good? How often does MOZ refresh external links. Please see: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.totalvac.com None of the links for the anchor text <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="vacuum cleaner parts vacuum parts vacuum bags vacuum cleaner bags" data-id="46391436859">vacuum cleaner parts vacuum part...</a> in MOZ exist? We got hit extremely hard by Penguin in May
Link Building | | totalvac0 -
About buy broken links...
I found some web adress that are not online anymore.. but when I open these adresses on open site explorer I can see links and page athority for these domains... PA 41 and DA 29 My question is... Can I buy these adress and using their page and rank juice to my website? Because they are avaliable... All these domains are from my country and LTD What can I do...? Thank you
Link Building | | lans27870 -
Does the ratio of external nofollow links to external "do follow" links matter in terms of SERPs ranking?
My site has an external link nofollow:dofollow ratio of approximately 1:1 That is, there are about as many nofollow external links as "do follow" external links. I have an impression that the ratio of no-follow to "do follow" links is a factor in the way that our website shows up in SERPs. I have the impression from reading a variety of sources, and from looking at Seomoz, that calculate "trust" factors as if they mattered (in SERPs), that seem to value a relatively low nofollow:dofollow ratio. Am I correct about that? Thanks,
Link Building | | tcolling
Tim PS - I don't know whether or not this matters, but our website is at: www.trustworthycare.com - Tim0 -
Link footprints
Hi! I have question about link footprints. What should be taken into consideration? Is it real issue when your backlinks have heavy footprint? Thanks for answer..
Link Building | | asystematic1 -
Link building
I have two separate websites on different servers and was wondering that since reciprocal links effectively eliminate each other, I'm curious if this link strategy will keep the links counting. Here's the strategy: I will have someone link to my site A and if i link to their site from my site B in a three way link strategy, will the links count even though both my site A and B have me listed as the Whois so Google knows that both sites are owned by me? Or will the links be discounted as reciprocal? Thanks in advance for your feedback! Take care, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100