Need advice on best strategy for removing these bad links.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Is a Link Wheel Safe If I Control the Wheel?
Hi, folks. Our company operates over 50 disease-specific, nice websites. Currently, we're building resource/landing pages for some therapies and other related topics. One experimental therapy is being investigated across four different disease types: cystic fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Hemophilia, and cancers. We have sites for all of them, and have created original landing pages for each site. Question: is it safe / does it make sense to "link wheel" these pages, especially since the wheel is composed of all our own sites? The other option of course is to simply interlink all of them, but will I get more visibility with a cyclical linking scheme? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Michael_Nace1 -
Tiered back links
Playing catch up with latest SEO techniques and wanted to ask the community what opinion is with generated tiered back links. For example, in one month having - 50 tier one links, 250 tier two links and 1000 tier three links generated within articles forums, social networks, guestbooks etc. In my view this is blackhat, my question is - is this still acceptable? or will it be damaging my domain? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | w4rdy0 -
Strategies to recover from a Google Penalty?
2 years ago we took over a client who had a hacked site and also had signed up with a black hat SEO team that set up 50 spammy directory links back to the site. Since then we have cleaned up the hacks, had the site reviewed by Google and readded to the Search Index, and disavowed all the directory links through GWT. Over the last 2 years, we've encouraged the client to create new content and have developed a small but engaged social following. The website is www.fishtalesoutfitting.com/. The site's domain authority is 30, but it struggles to rank higher than 20 for even uncompetitive long tail keywords. Other sites with much lower domain authorities outrank the site for our primary keywords. We are now overhauling the site design and content. We are considering creating an entirely new URL for the primary domain. We would then use 301 redirects from the old url to the new. We'd welcome insight into why the current site may still be getting penalized, as well as thoughts on our strategy or other recommendations to recover from the events of 2 years ago. Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mlwilmore0 -
Help with a Link Building Audit
A customer wants to have a better position with a keyword (he has already a great position, but he wants more...). So he need a bit of extra link building to have better position in serp(this niche is very competitive so on page is not sufficient).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Maximilian21
He asked me to do a Link Building Analysis to find good link opportunities.
How can i structure a good report? I need something like a Seo Audit for link building. That's my idea:
Identify what are the business objectives
Identify the brand strenghts and weakness
Find the strongest competitors and understand their tactics
See what are the top links that they have
Copy their best strategies
Find new strategies not used by the competitors
What else i can do for my link building audit?0 -
Can you disavow a spamy link that is not pointing to your website?
We have submitted several really spammy websites to the Google spam team. We noticed they take a very long time to react to submissions. Do you know if it is possible to disavow a link that is not pointing to your website but rather to a very spammy website? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Best use of domains with keywords
I own a domain with just the company name in it (no keywords) that I use as main domain. I also own some other domain with keywords inside that right now I redirect all to the main domain with a 301 redirect. What is the best use for these domains? Should I use them when I do link building or is better to use just the main domain? Can they be useful to increase the main domain link juice/page rank? If yes, how? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | darkanweb0 -
Text indent -9999px on logo, is it bad??
I saw a question on this forum that was saying that text-indent -9999px was bad SEO, or even worse blackhat seo... But isn't it what everyone is doing for image replacement in logos...? Is it really bad?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | i-kreo0 -
Are unusual chinese links likely to be black hat?
Hello, I noticed that this onepage website: http://www.clearpixel.net/ ranks at #11 for web design London so I did some research using SEO Moz Pro. Turns out that alll their links are from Chinese directory style sites. Does this demonstrate black hat SEO? If not, how do I go about getting links on Chinese sites with .gov urls. Many thanks, Martin Hofschroer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinHof0