How to handle bad DoFollow links to pages on my site that no longer exist
-
I briefly had a forum on one of my sites, but after getting inundated with spam I decided to remove it for the time being. During the brief time it was up, most of the spammers were stopped from registering, but a few managed to get through and posted tons of links to their prescription drug sites. These posts were deleted almost instantly, but the spammers also created DoFollow backlinks on high authority community sites like ning.
The forum posts they linked to were deleted immediately, so the links never went anywhere and the forum has been deleted entirely for a few months now. When clicked, the spam backlinks now bring someone to a "Sorry, that page doesn’t exist" page on my site.
My site suffered a bit in the last Panda update and it made me look through my backlink profile, finding lots of these links - even though the pages on my site are long gone, could these links be hurting my site?
Can a DoFollow link to a site help or hurt the main domain, even if the actual page it's linking to is deleted?
-
Thanks Charles, I will try to get these links taken down.
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
-
Other sites linking to our site through sitewide footers
Hello, We have other sites linking to our site through images in sitewide footers, resulting in a link from every page of each site. Those sites are not owned by us and they decided to link to us on their own. They usually link to us as their "sponsor" or "partner", sponsor as in sponsor of some event and partner as in we sometimes work together on joint initiatives. I've searched Moz forum and other articles, but haven't been able to find an answer to this question. We'd like to make sure Google doesn't consider it to be spammy and we don't get any sort of penalty. Should we ask them not to link to us through those images in a sitewide footer or ask them to simply add "nofollow"? We don't want to remove those links if they are not considered to be harmful and removing them will hurt our DA/PA.
Link Building | | marynau0 -
Has your site ever been targeted by malicious link building executed by a competitor?
I'm pretty sure one of my client's sites has been targeted by malicious black hat link building tactics employed by a competitor site. Over the last few weeks we've gotten 100s of super low quality spammy backlinks. No one has been doing link building, so the only thing I can think of is that competitor entered our URL into some spammy backlink building sites. Has anyone else experienced this? It's the real estate industry, so I wouldn't be surprised considering how competitive it is, but I'd love to hear your experiences.
Link Building | | JBMediaGroup1 -
Does google flag bad back links
where would we go identify the links that are bad is there a way to get a list of each individual link not just the site and number from the site
Link Building | | CostumeD0 -
Link building for a new site... where do I start?
Hi all, I'm new and have just launched my website. I need to start building my backlinks and I need to know how I can go about getting started? I read the beginners guide but still stuck on where to start? Any advice Thanks
Link Building | | edward-may0 -
Are the following considered bad links for Link Building.
I've been doing a lot of research lately on link building & I've read a lot about having a diverse amount of links. Social links, Blog links, comment links, footer links, No follow links, Directory links as well as links with Anchor text URL match, brand match, partial brand match, non-descriptive, and with keywords. But there is a lot of talk of removing those links that look like a site that's built just for link building purposes.... but Directories are basically built for link building are they not? I'm wondering if anyone can tell me if they feel links from the following directories would be bad links. (Non-Paid) http://www.yoganza.com http://www.wkool.com http://www.wee-directory.com http://www.voicelet.com www.hotfrog.ca http://www.webdirectorieslist.com http://multiplelistingboard.com http://mozdirectory.net http://freedirectorypr.info Industry specific below: http://bestautolinks .com http://automotivedome.com http://automobilebuzz.com http://craigsautolinks.com Thanks so much for the help!
Link Building | | DCochrane0 -
Why does my site only have 4 internal followed links/internal links?
When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
Link exchanges no longer a big mistake?
Good Morning from Zero Degrees C very icy Wetherby UK... For eons i was under the understanding that if you had a choice over just inbound links verses a link exchange just inbound links wins hands down. Ive always just chased inbound links and never advocated link exhanges ie I link to you, you link to me. But stop the bus! I just read this here on the A - Z of link building strategies which advocates recipricol link exchanges: "Creating link pages that carry hundreds of links to slightly relevant 'partners' don't work anymore (ever wondered why most links.php pages have a grey PageRank?), but establishing link partnerships with a small amount of highly relevant websites can definitely be useful." So is it best practice now to have link exchanges? I always thought this was a mistake as it would lead to SEO juice leakage (Hate this term, but couldnt muster another one)unless you "Covertly" added a do no follow snippet in your outbound links. Any insights welcome 🙂
Link Building | | Nightwing0 -
Paying someone to get me links-bad idea?
By this i dont mean paying for links as such...I mean the people that advertise on websites like Fiverr saying they will get you links to your site from edu/gov domains...or angela/paul style links etc. I'm doing all the proper link building stuff like blogging/guest blogs/articles etc etc but am up against competitiors with thousands of links...Is this a way to 'catch up' or should it be avoided. I'm new to all of this so be gentle lol...grateful for any replies
Link Building | | bridaldesigns0