Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why would links that were deleted by me 3 months ago still show up in reports?
-
I inadvertently created a mini link farm some time back by linking all of my parked domains (2000 plus) to some of my live websites (I was green and didn't think linking between the same owner sites / domains was an issue). These websites were doing well until Penguin and although I did not get any 'bad link' advices from Google I figure I was hit by Penguin.
So about 3 or 4 months ago I painstakingly deleted ALL links from all of those domains that I still own (only 500 or so - the others were allowed to lapse). None of those domains have any links linking out at all but old links from those domains are still showing up in WMT and in SEOmoz and every other link tracking report I have run.
So why would these links still be reported?
How long do old links stay in the internet archives? This may sound like a strange question but do links 'remain with a domain for a given period of time regardless'? Are links archived before being 'thrown out' of the web. I know Google keeps archives of data that has expired, been deleted, website closed etc, etc for about 3 years or so (?).
In an effort to correct a situation I have spent countless hours manually deleting thousands of links but they won't go away.
Looking for some insight here please.
cheers,
Mike
-
I would imagine the reason they are still showing up is a combination of the sites not being crawled often or deep enough and the delay on the updating of the links tools.
You could try getting the sites that used to link to you but no longer do re-crawled especially the pages that used to have your links on.
I believe this should see a refreshing of the links tools in time.
I hope this helps
Sean
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
-
Does Google only show high rankings to webmasters?
Hello! I'm using Google Chrome browser. On the browser logged in with the Google Web Master account, the keyword ranking of my site is ranked on pages 1 to 2. However, in the case of the Google Secret tab and other browsers that have not logged in to the Google Web Master account, the keyword ranking of my site is only 10 pages. Which one is more reliable?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 1kB_man_YWH
Does it only show higher rankings to webmasters?
Or will you soon be able to see the high ranking that has only been seen by webmasters in other browsers? I desperately need your help. Thank you. I look forward to your kind cooperation.2 -
Should I Report A SEO Agency to Google
Our competitor has employed the services of a spammy SEO agency that sends spammy links to our site. Though our rankings were affected we have taken the necessary steps. It is possible to send evidence to Google so that they can take down the site. I want to take this action so that other sites will not be affected by them again.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Halmblogmusic0 -
New Flurry of thousands of bad links from 3 Spammy websites. Disavow?
I also discovered that a website www.prlog.ru put 32 links to my website. It is a russian site. It has a 32% spam score. Is that high? I think I need to disavow. Another spammy website link has spam score of 16% with with several thousand links. I added one link to the site medexplorer.com 6 years ago and it was fine. Now it has thousands of links. Should I disavow all three?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
I show different versions of the same page to the crawlers and users, but do not want to do anymore
Hello, While Google could not read JavaScript, I created two versions of the same page, one of them is for human and another is for Google. Now I do not want to serve different content to the search engine. But, I am worry if I will lose my traffic value. What is the best way to succeed it without loss? Can you help me?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kipra0 -
Should I delete older posts on my site that are lower quality?
Hey guys! Thanks in advance for thinking through this with me. You're appreciated! I have 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content that has been a large focus of mine over the last couple years. They're incredibly important to my business. That said, less experienced me did what I thought was best by hiring a freelance writer to create extra content to interlink them and add relevancy to the overall site. Looking back through everything, I am starting to realize that this extra content, which now makes up 1/3 my site, is at about 65%-70% quality AND only gets a total of about 250 visitors per month combined -- for all 384 articles. Rather than spending the next 9 months and investing in a higher quality content creator to revamp them, I am seeing the next best option to remove them. From a pros perspective, do you guys think removing these 384 lower quality articles is my best option and focusing my efforts on a better UX, faster site, and continual upgrading of the 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content? I'm honestly at a point where I am ready to cut my losses, admit my mistakes, and swear to publish nothing but gold moving forward. I'd love to hear how you would approach this situation! Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ryj0 -
Hiding content or links in responsive design
Hi, I found a lot of information about responsive design and SEO, mostly theories no real experiment and I'd like to find a clear answer if someone tested that. Google says:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NurunMTL
Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details For usability reasons sometimes you need to hide content or links completely (not accessible at all by the visitor) on your page for small resolutions (mobile) using CSS ("visibility:hidden" or "display:none") Is this counted as hidden content and could penalize your site or not? What do you guys do when you create responsive design websites? Thanks! GaB0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
Deny visitors by referrer in .htaccess to clean up spammy links?
I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why. Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed. After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link. I think there are two parts to the conversation... Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site? If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | highlyrelevant0