Removing thousands of shady backlinks?
-
Hey guys,
We've been hired to redesign a website that has thousands of backlinks created by a (possibly) shady offshore company, and I'm wondering if anyone out there has experience dealing with a deletion of this size and type. Is it as simple as just disavowing the whole lot?
Thanks,
Jason
-
The site is ranking well and was not affected from Penguin. However, we believe the amount of bad backlinks (ranging from hundreds to thousands) will hurt the site's ranking soon. Our client has yet to receive any manual warning from Google as well.
-
Jason
You have some great detailed answers from Marie and Marcus. I guess the question I'd like to ask is, Why are you looking into this ? Did you get to a point where your site is not ranking as well before ? Or is it that you got an actual un-natural links warning ?
That could help justify what the next steps should be.
-
Marie:
Sorry, but I couldn't resist responding to this one. It's not the answer that's confusing, it's the situation. I like to compare modern SEO to fixing Macs (what I did in my previous lifetime). Sometimes you have to get out the goat entrails and burn the incense.
Sometimes there isn't an easy answer. Strangely enough on my site (which I inherited 3 months ago), the "bad" links don't seem to have really damaged it, as we have a Domain Authority of 63. Go figure.
Jim
-
The answer depends on whether or not the site has a manual penalty against it. If there is a message in WMT of unnatural links then it won't be enough to just disavow. You've got to go through a whole process of trying to manually remove links and reporting your efforts to Google and then disavowing the rest.
If you want to simply have those backlinks nofollowed then disavowing the whole lot will do the trick.
However, be careful if you're disavowing all of the links. I have seen cases where people went disavowing links willy nilly and did more harm than good. If the plan is to simply start over with a clean slate then go ahead and disavow. The problem is that these links will still be present in your backlink profile whether you use OSE, ahrefs, majestic or even WMT. They will simply be treated as nofollowed by Google.
But if you are trying to save some of the existing rankings then whether or not you disavow can be a complicated decision.
For example, the links could be shady, but if the site hasn't been affected by Penguin then you may not have to remove them. Some of them could actually be helping. Remember, Penguin is an algorithm and doesn't catch EVERYTHING.
Or, for another example, if the site has been affected by Penguin for certain keywords then you may not be able to rank for those keywords until you get rid of Penguin. But here's the problem - no one really knows with certainty how to do that. Some SEOs will tell you that disavowing all your links will clear it. Some will tell you that Penguin has already disavowed all of your links and all you need to do is get some good links. There are very few (if any) case studies that really show a site what to do.
How's that for a confusing answer? LOL!
-
Hey Jason
In a word, no, no way that simple. Google are simply not going to process that disavow unless they see you (or your client) have made a considerable effort in the removal of those links. In all likelyhood, it will take a good few months and some considerable effort to show that you have gone to lengths enough to satisfy them.
There are a bunch of tools that can help, but ultimately, there is still a lot of manual work involved in any clean up.
Few pointers.
Tools worth bothering with.
- Removeem
- Rmoov
- Link Detox
None of these will do the job for you and in all likelihood, you will want to use all three. Beyond that, if there is a redesign you can 404 old pages on the other site to kill inbound links but if most of your shady links are pointing at the homepage, there is not a lot you can do about them other than clean up and attempt a disavow.
You are going to have to document the whole process from putting together a list of candidate links for removal & collecting email addresses through to every removal request. I would also suggest possibly going beyond just the email and looking at phone numbers, letters and anything else you can do to show the level of effort required.
Depending on the history and any penalties you are going to want to submit your disavow and a reconsideration request detailing all of your tireless and persistant efforts.
In summary, it's not terribly hard or complicated, but there is just a whole bunch of work involved to do the job properly and to a level that Google is going to be happy with and don't expect results over night. My advice would be to brief your client that a honest clean up could take up to three months and three reinclusion requests along with a considerable investment in man hours to do the job properly.
This is a good job for an intern or apprentice. Well, let me rephrase that, it's a good job to give to an intern or apprentice, it's likely going to be quite a sucky job for them to have to do but baptism of fire and all!
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
301 Redirects from example.com to store.example.com and then removing store.example.com subdomain
Hi I'm trying to wrap my head around the best approach for migrating our website. We're migrating from our example.com (joomla) site to our existing store.example.com (shopify) site... with the plan to finish the redirects/migration then remove the subdomain from shopify and use example.com moving forward. I've never done this and asking here to see if any harm will come from re-directing example.com URLs to store.example.com URL's then changing the store.example.com URL's to example.com. Right now my plan would run like this: redirect example.com URL's to store.example.com remove subdomain on store.example.com use example.com moving forward. wonder what happens next? Is there going to be any issues here, possible harm to the URL's?
Technical SEO | | Minarets0 -
What is the difference between 301 redirects and backlinks?
i have seen some 301 redirects on my site billsonline, can anyone please explain the difference between backlinks and 301 redirects, i have read some articles where the writer was stating that 301 are not good for website.
Technical SEO | | aliho0 -
Bulk URL Removal in Webmaster Tools
One of Wordpress sites was hacked (for about 10 hours), and Google picked up 4000+ urls in the index. The site is fixed, but I'm stuck with all those urls in the index. All the urls of of the form: walkerorthodontics.com/index.php?online-payday-cash-loan.htmloncewe The only bulk removal option I could find was to remove an entire folder, but I can't do that, as it would only leave the homepage and kill off everything else. For some crazy reason, the removal tools doesn't support wildcards, so that obvious solution is right out. So, how do it get rid of 4000 results? And no, waiting around for them to 404 out of the index isn't an option.
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Missing Meta Tags - "thousands" using WooCommerce?
Recently took a site live for a client using WP/WooCommerce to replace their antiquated shopping cart site and have encountered thousands of "Missing Meta Description Tag" errors. Have researched and tried a couple different approaches, but nothing really seems to fix this problem. I'm happy to continue to research, but have never encountered this problem before. Anyone else encountered similar? If so, how did you fix? Which resources to start with? 2VKDRVx
Technical SEO | | twelvetwo.net0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Why has Google removed meta descriptions from SERPS?
One of my clients' sites has just been redesigned with lots of new URLs added. So the 301 redirections have been put in place and most of the new URLs have now been indexed. BUT Google is still showing all the old URLs in the SERPS and even worse it only displays the title tag. The meta description is not shown, no rich snippet, no text, nothing below the title. This is proving disastrous as visitors are not clicking on a result with no description. I have to assume its got something to do with the redirection, but why is it not showing the descriptions? I've checked the old URLs and he meta description is definitely still in the code, but Google is choosing not to show it. I've never seen this before so I'm struggling for an answer. I'd like to know why or how this is happening, and if it can be resolved. I realise that this may be resolved when Google stops showing all the old URLs but there's no telling how long that will take (can it be speeded up?)
Technical SEO | | Websensejim0 -
Removing 301 Redirects
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo? Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure. Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file. So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Can a site be removed from alexa?
let's say you have complete control over the webserver, and the hosting server. is there a way to set it up so that alexa statistics CANNOT be gained?
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites0