Need advice on best strategy for removing these bad links.
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Heres the scenario...
We recently took on a new client who's previous seo company had partaken in some dodgy link building tactics.
They appear to have done some blog comment spam, very poorly.
The situation we are now in is this:
We have a site with an internal page deemed more important than the homepage (the homepage has 60 linking root domains and the internal page 879). It looks as though the previous seo company submitted a disavow request, theres a message in webmaster tools from a few weeks back saying it had been received, but no further correspondence.
I have doubts as to whether this disavow request was done correctly... Plus im not sure that Google has issued the site a warning yet as they are ranking position one for the keyword on the internal page.
Our clients want us to handle this in the correct manner, whether it be to simply ignore it and wait for Google to send a warning about the links, remove the offending internal page and leave a 404, or try to disavow the links that google doesnt know about yet from 800+ websites.
Suggestions for the best practice for dealing with this situation?
Any advice is much appreciated,
Thanks, Hayley.
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Normally if Google didn't send any warning of unnaatural linking to your site you're not supposed to send a disavowing request since this just raise the attention goole is paying to your site, however I unserstand you want to prevent any issue by acting before any warning message.
About the disavow request, if that've been received google should have take that into consideration.
You said that that page was an offending page so you want to 404 it. I think that if you're getting rid of that page returning a 404 you're preventing that (bad) value to be added to your domain. I think that this is a correct approach. Just be sure that those 879 links are all bad because you don't want to lose all that value. If there are good links pointing there just ask those webmasters to point to your homepage instead. Just be sure that if there was some good content inthat page it has moved to your home before asking a link to be changed.
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