Unnatural Link Profile
-
Hi All,
We are about to take on a new client whose site has been penalised for having a very unnatural link profile. They have over 1k links, which have 5 differing anchor texts, though the majority leans towards one particular phrase.
Their previous SEO company had done this for them and the strategy worked, keeping them in the top 3 for most phrases, until Penguin. Now they reside in the 70-100 ranks.
My initial though is we need to get rid of a lot of these links, however its going to be labour intensive and as we all know, labour is expensive.
The website is nicely designed and has lots of great unique content. Its just the link profile letting it down.
My question is;
If this were your client, what would you recommend? A link removal program which could take a long time and be very expensive or would you recommend that they start again and build a new site, also expensive and time consuming.
or would you suggest something different?
If anyone knows of any Link removal people who have done a good job in the past I'd love to get some contact details.
Thanks
Aran
-
If its 1K, LinkDelete can probably do it for about $400-$500.
But the main problem is that the links aren't guaranteed to be removed. Its based on cooperation of those webmasters, which usually are not helpful.
Another big problem is that this is a gamble.
1- You don't know if the links can be removed (uncooperative webmasters)
2- Even if you remove a good portion of links, it doesn't GUARANTEE an accepted reconsideration from Google.
-
Thanks William.
The client will not be happy to start over again, but I cannot see them being happy to spend money deleting links which they paid the last guys to implement!
you know what clients are like!!
Its a tough call! I'll check out the services you mentioned, thanks.
-
Hi Aran,
Some link removal services are rmoov and linkdelete. Google those to find exact site.
As for using a new domain, it is brought up a lot. It really varies for what your client's goals are and what you hope to achieve. The site was previously ranking at 3 but that was with spammy links. Now without those links would they still rank? Probably not.
If the site has SOME good links I'd suggest keeping the domain and removing those 1k links as it is not THAT bad if they are on same domains. But getting them removed is a hard task.
If the site has no good links and the domain isn't anything special like an EMD, I'd say just dump it. This is assuming the domain is not anything important like brand name.
You will have to consult with your client and see what they want and what their budget is. Removing links is hella annoying. LinkDelete does a lot of it for you and customer service is good overall.
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
-
Too many links pointing to our privacy policy page: Hurting our ranking efforts of main pages?
Hi community, As per the "Links" report from GSC, there are millions of pages pointing to our privacy policy page. We can expect high number of links to this page being ours an open source product. But these links are overtaking the count of links pointing to our homepage which are very artificial from few spammy or low quality sites. "Privacy policy" anchor text is also been the top anchor text. Our homepage ranking dropped and I suspect this is the culprit. Google might be considering this is the important page being linked on top with anchor text. Shall I Disavow these sites and will this makes Google stop counting links, and the anchor text coming from these sites as well? Suggestions please. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Link with Anchor to header of the page: Keyword is ranking
I saw something interesting this week. I am doing research and spec-ing out a content page we are creating and one of our competitors "office Depot" on their phone repair page create exact match keywords that lead to an anchor that took you to the header of that pages. They were ranking first for all of those keywords with little to no links Thier strategy is the more local long tail that includes "near me" Have you guys ever seen this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uBreakiFix
this is the URL: https://www.officedepot.com/a/content/customer-service/samedayrepair/ They are ranking for these keywords ( Top 3 nationally ) iphone 6 repair near me iphone 7 repair near me I am assuming that this is both due to their PA and DA authority shifting the authority to itself, but it does not make sense how they are lacking in a lot of SEO low-hanging fruits like H1/H2 keyword saturation, URL, Title Tag within this content page....Anyone up for discussing this?0 -
Nofollow for reciprocal links?
Hi, We have reciprocal links with our business partners. Their websites have been listed on our website with "nofollow" links and they link to our website with "nofollow" or "dofollow" links. Is this wrong having reciprocal links? And if they are our partners, "nofollow" or "dofollow" is better? I don't think there will be anymore link juice loss with dofollow links from our website?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Someone has built low quality links to my site - what should I do?
Hey guys, I was wondering whether you could offer me some help on something. One of the site's I'm working on has a blog attached to it and we sometimes accept guest posts from authors. A month or so back we published a blog that has been attracting a number of low-quality backlinks. Having looked into the matter further, it turned out that the client who had created the guest post was doing something called "tiered link building" and was building crappy links to their guest post content on other websites. I have subsequently deleted the blog post in question - will this devalue/cancel out the inbound links pointing to the original URL? Or do I need to do something extra? Disavow even? Comments appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Is there a danger linking to and from one website too many times?
Basically my webdeveloper has suggested that instead of using a subfolder to create an English and Korean version of the site I should create two different websites and then link them both together to provide the page in English, or in Korean, which ever the case may be. My immediate reaction is that search engines may perceive this kind of linking to be manipulative, as you can imagine there will be a lot of links (One for every page). Do you think it is OK to create two webpages and link them together page by page? Or do you think that the site will get penalized by search engines for link farming or link exchanging. Regards, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoGri0 -
Linking C blocks strategy - Which hat is this tactic?
This related to a previous question I had about satellite sites. I questioned the white-hativity of their strategy. Basically to increase the number of linking C blocks they created 100+ websites on different C blocks that link back to our main domain. The issue I see is that- the sites are 98% exactly the same in appearance and content. Only small paragraph is different on the homepage. the sites only have outbound links to our main domain, no in-bound links Is this a legit? I am not an SEO expert, but have receive awesome advice here. So thank you in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
Does Google Consider a Follow Affiliate Link into my site a paid link?
Let's say I have a link coming into my domain like this http://www.mydomain.com/l/freerol.aspx?AID=674&subid=Week+2+Freeroll&pid=120 Do you think Google recognizes this as paid link? These links are follow links. I am working on a site that has tons of these, but ranks fairly well. They did lose some ranking over the past month or so, and I am wondering if it might be related to a recent iteration of Penguin. These are very high PR inbound links and from a number of good domains, so I would not want to make a mistake and have client get affiliates to no follow if that is going to cause his rankings to drop more. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Robertnweil10
