Dealing with internal pages with bad backlinks - is this approach OK?

[McTaggart]

Hi all,

I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages.

These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.

I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs.

Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it?

Thanks in advance, Luke

[McTaggart]

Thanks Robert and Ryan for your great input on this, Luke

[RobertFisher]

Ryan

Thanks for your input on this. The client is a seller of very big ticket item and the developer/seo she had was very clever at creating his own link farm/pyramid/etc. 
The good news for her was that she had a lot of industry cites that linked to her site and she has always done a great job at her own PR which brought in more quality links.

I was not trying to draw a corollary to specific links and PA/DA but show a broad picture around all the links (of which at least half were poor/bad) and how as those go away things change - which is I think a portion of what you are saying.

What I am showing with the images is that the links start going away and as the result DA/PA drops...but, we begin to see a concomitant rise in mozTrust which I believe can be taken as a signal - how exact I could not guess - that things will improve. It would appear that based on your comments I was a bit less than clear - thanks for the assist.

The reason we did not go into aggressive link removal with the client was due in large part to her relationship with past dev. She was very concerned about how they perceived their treatment. We had to be a bit cautious and we understood (and told her) the possible consequences.

Thanks for your clarity; I do believe there is more to come from Google around this issue.

All the best,

Robert

[RyanKent]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for sharing this information from your current case study. It is always great to see real data.

The only piece of actionable information I am able to gather from the images is the number of links to your client's site has dropped dramatically. I love and use Moz metrics regularly (PA/DA/mT/mR) but they mainly examine the total number of links and the metrics of the linking site. PA/DA do not distinguish a good link from a bad link.

I am sure we can examine a spammy site and notice high PA/DA but lower mT but if you look at an OK site with many links like that of your client, the results are much harder to distinguish, especially if they have a mix of good and bad links. I have to presume if you client is consistently selling millions in product sales they have earned some good links.

To be clear, I offer link removal services to clients so I have a bias, but I also do not want to offer those services but feel compelled to do such. My pricing model is based on earning clients long term, not earning profits from site owners who are at their most desperate time. For almost every client I worked with, if I saw a significant amount of manipulative links to their site then they you can examine their analytics and see significant traffic drops since the time Google began penalizing sites for manipulative links.

I can even recall around April 1st I accepted a new client. I examined his backlink profile and advised the client to clean up their link profile. The client agreed and we began work and then on April 24th the client was hit be Penguin. In my experience, manipulative links need to be removed. Even if I am wrong, I expect the next Penguin update to hit sooner rather then later, and in waves like Panda. When it does, expect a lot more sites to be impacted. We can only hope Google introduces a "disavow" feature before the next Penguin update.

---

Some data from a penalized client I am working with now:

• client site name is 100% keyword base

• client spent over 1 million on purchasing their domain name.

• client has numerous manipulative links

Metrics:

Home page PA 70, DA 63, mR 4.7, mT 5.4

This client's site has nothing to do with food, but let's compare metrics with a site without manipulative links. I use Kentucky Fried Chicken as my goto site for such things, as they are a large company which seemingly does not work with a SEO consultant (hey Colonel, give me a call!):

Home page PA 85, DA 81, mR 6.0, mT 6.3

Clearly kfc.com is a stronger site all around, but there is nothing I can gain from looking at these numbers to tell me how my client's site is penalized for manipulative links and does not even rank for the exact match of his domain name anymore. Based on my experience, once we remove the links the site will pop right back up in SERPs. Sure they will take some form of hit due to the lost links, but the site can freely rank once again.

[RobertFisher]

Luke

Even with 4 out of 24 I would think your issue will likely fall into line with this post by Barry Schwartz with SearchEngine Roundtable about manual link actions

Even if they were to go to this degree, the only pages that would be effected would be the ones with the links. And, it is likely the degree of that effect would be the mitigation of any algorithmic impact from the "bad" links.

I still think that by taking a bit less drastic approach, you can achieve your aims. Understand, there is no guarantee in that, I am telling you what I would do. I can tell you that I was looking at a client site yesterday and when we took on the site in Jan/Feb, she had some of the worst looking link pyramids, etc. I have seen. It was junk.

We changed hosting which changed IP and obviously linking C blocks. But, we did nothing but watch the links. We did not go after dropping them, etc. In May, Penguin arrives and we see changes begin. But, we did nothing but watch.

As you can see there are changes, but on the whole even with all the BS there is nothing totally detrimental. NOTE: This site sells an extremely high dollar product (7 figures) so a minor fluctuation in ranking does not effect it on the order it would an ecommerce site for example. But, I am encouraged at seeing how the effect on DA is negligible and it is now rising, etc. Also, look how we have lost LRD's but mozTrust is rising. Interesting at least.

So, I do not know if this is helpful, but I certainly hope it is.

Best

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[McTaggart]

Hi Robert and thanks for your feedback there - 4 out of 24 pages are of some concern here. SERPs and enquiries from these internal pages is, good so they did get some ROI from their linkbuilding work. That said, not sure leaving things as they stand is worth the risk. This is locally-focused SEO, in an area without huge competition.

Regarding these 4 pages, I'm seeing a mix of article submission / social bookmarketing going on and use of poor quality directories (in the main using same directory description text over and over again, and the same article submission text) - though I haven't found any gambling or other such website nasties backlinking to the website in question.

Of these 4 pages, I'm seeing between 100 and 250 backlinks per page (Homepage has around 800 backlinks - generally OK and all looks very natural) - and no other internal pages, other than these 4 pages, have more than 5 backlinks each.

[RobertFisher]

Luke,

The first thing I see is this sentence: These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.

So in answering you, I will treat it as I would a client. Do these pages bring you business, improve your ROI, etc.? If the answer is yes, I am going to approach the problem very cautiously. Let's assume they are important.

For those pages that are offending you say there are a couple (I will guess that means not more than 5). If your site is fairly large 50 plus pages for example, I do not see these pages impacting the site negatively in our current environment. But, you could simply send a few messages out to those linking and request that they remove the links.
Keep a record that you did and send more than one request. At the same time, go out and get a few good links to the same pages to make the weight change a bit toward better links.

If you change the urls of the pages there is no need to change 404. Simply leave it as a search for what you were looking for. Those directories won't be searching. You are correct in not doing redirect involving old urls in this case.

Hope this helps and provides a bit of perspective.

best