What would you consider a "bad link"?
-
So, our website has a pretty profound collection of inbound links- which no one has really been taking care of the past 10 years. lol. Our users love us and they love to talk about us every chance they get. Which is great, except that I am new to the company and I am trying to sort through our links. Lots of them come from foreign forums and some are even in "hacking" forums, because some of our "not so great" users abuse our service. So, how am I am to tell what links and sites are good vs. bad? I have found some that are on old industry related link sites, I should definitely try to get rid of those right? Thanks in advance for the help and sorry if I am being unclear.
-
I'm more concerned about the number of domains rather than the number of links. Google's usually pretty good at figuring out that those 14000 links are actually just one domain.
If you've got a pattern of obviously manipulative linking then you may want to consider removing them. But you could do yourself more harm than good in doing so though. If the vast majority of your link profile is natural I'd ignore those self made links. The only exception would be, perhaps, if these links all contained anchor text for which you were trying to rank. Then there's a chance that a future Penguin refresh could get ahold of that. It's a tough call.
-
I think any natural link is fine as long as its not a gambling, pharmaceutics or porn website. I would caution to make sure that there isn't any negative SEO going on, but it sounds like you have a self sustaining link building campaign without having to do anything.
-
Thanks for that! These are all natural links, except for one case. When the site was first established, they had users that were interested use a referral program. If the user posted our image with a link to our site, they could earn referral points. Are these bad? I was thinking yes. One site alone is linking up to 14k times.
-
Did you, (or an SEO on your behalf) actually build any of these links? Or did they come to you naturally? If you didn't build them, don't worry about them.
I have a site for which I have done no link building. It is a content site that only attracts natural links. Even this site has some spammy links, but I'm not worried one bit about removing them.
You don't need to remove links unless you have been building them yourself. Now some would argue that you may want to remove links in the case of negative SEO, but that is really rare.
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
-
Link Building where link building is dead. Latest tactics in a land of content.
Hello, What is your latest link building techniques considering manual link building is basically dead, and you should really build good content to drive results. Link building has really become less important. It seems to be much more 10X content now. What would you recommend for basic link building considering this besides the 50 first Links video by Rand, which is excellent. Thanks, Bob
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Should I disavow these links?
Hi all, I have a site that is a year old, we have been building backlinks organically - probably around 50 or so - then almost overnight we had100s of spammy links. Screenshot here: https://ibb.co/cijiub My questions: Should I disavow these? What happens if I don't disavow these? Can I work out where they came from? If I disavow a few of them, is this a token offering to the Google Gods that will lower my risk of being penalised? Thank you. cijiub
Link Building | | Bee1591 -
Links
Hi, im wondering if links that is not exact anchor links gives any boost for rankings? Example if lets say somebody links to my site http://domain.com/category/article with anchor: domainname or url link.
Link Building | | Rob_I0 -
Link Value
My question is how valuable is getting a link from a PA 71 with roughly 20 links on it. I guess I am saying how many links from a PA of 30 would be a comparable indicator. I understand there is an almost exponential value of authority as they go higher, but I am looking for a good explanation from a technical aspect. Hypothetical Scenario Would a person be better off pursing 20 links from PA25 pages, or would you be better only getting 1 from the PA71 all things equal.
Link Building | | mbarden260 -
Link over-building?
Hello all. One of the first things we do for our clients is to claim their local listings, include them on a set of selected directories (8-10), and blog directories (5), if applicable. Since they will all be linked to the client site, could doing all of this at once run us into problems with unnatural link growth? Thanks! Frank
Link Building | | FrankSweeney0 -
Will 404-ing a URL neutralise any bad incoming links?
We're cleaning up one of our sites which was affected by Penguin. If we rename an example page1.html (which has 400 bad incoming links) to page2.html (with no 301 redirects), will Google disregard the poor links entirely? So, page1.html will return a 404 page. Many thanks for your help. James P.S. I am aware that we may lose any positive link juice from any 'good' links which come in to page1.html.
Link Building | | bytestart0 -
Does using "pring2web" hurt SEO?
I've never really seen this before but one of my clients has 4000+ links from Print2Web. Their rankings are falling back a bit but I'm wondering if this is part of the problem. They don't seem to say their service is about SEO so I'm not so sure this is counted as spam or not. The main concern is that the next closest number of links from one site is only 97. Has anyone heard of this service? Can someone tell me from experience if using this service has hurt SEO efforts? Thanks!
Link Building | | BenRWoodard1 -
Why are none of my incoming links showing up in SEOmoz or Google? How do I get good legit incoming links?
There are hundreds of sites that are linking to my website, but nobody is showing it. Google wont display any when using link:eugenecomputergeeks.com, and in webmaster tools it only shows 46 incoming links. SEOmoz shows only 3 links. This just isn't so. Why is this? I DESPERATELY need valid incoming links from well ranked websites , and having lots of trouble getting them. Nobody in town with a well ranked site seems to want to do a link exchange, and I've already made the mistake of buying my way into directories, which didn't do anything good for my rankings. Thanks!
Link Building | | eugenecomputergeeks0