To Remove or not to Remove?
-
Howdy!
In the midst of communicating with Google because of a robots.txt issue, we had a bit of a backfire of sorts and received a notice of unnatural links. It's not a horror story or anything. It's seems more like, "Hey, before we address your other issues, here is something you should clean up" although I don't dare put words in Google's mouth.
A few years ago we hired an SEO company which shall remain nameless who did some anchor text blog posts for us which at the time, we had no idea was an issue.
There aren't an enormous number of these links hanging around, but checking our anchor text, in OSE, we saw that there are around 50 or so. We decided to use removeem.com as an easy way to request removal of these links.
However, on first run, removeem returned a large number of anchor text links beyond just these obvious ones that are actually natural links from users, fans or those that sell their goods on our website. Examples of these anchor text links would be:
"DEMO"
or
"Find My Products Here"
or
"Home Page"
http://www.mysite.com/goodstuff/foryoutubuy/html
We are a media selling site and we do have a lot of download sites that attempt to "share" content and link back to us via a DEMO link, etc. While these aren't the greatest sites in the world, they are nevertheless natural links. Heck, they are pirating our goods, shouldn't we at least garner the link juice from them?!!?
So, questions: Should we remove all of these links as removem.com suggests or only remove the ones that are unnatural and clarify with google that these other links are natural?
Thanks for your help!
Craig
-
Craig
That's a great example and I agree with you, you are on the right track. Think about your competition. They would also have the similar kinds of links. So you have those low quality, but natural links should be totally okay. With the nature of the web, nobody can control who links to them. Think what kinds of links Google, Yahoo or Amazon or Microsoft might be getting all day long.
I would only concentrate on the actual links that are problem, should out manipulation, clearly blog posts, guest posts, reviews which were done from crappier sites, spam blogs.
I hope this helps.
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
-
How long does it take Google to remove links after using disavow tool?
Hi guys, So we're currently in the process of removing some of the less useful and more suspect links from our profile, and used the Google disavow tool to do so. We uploaded the .txt file to the search console on 7th July this year, 2 months ago now, and according to our most recent site crawl, the suspect links are still showing up on our link profile. Do we have any idea how long this is roughly supposed to take? The ideas I've found online are conflicting - anything from 3-4 weeks to 6-9 months. Which is it? Is there any way of fast-tracking this process? Thanks!
Link Building | | rawdog0 -
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
Drop in Rankings After Removing Links
So I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
Old Linkwheel, should I remove?
I just found a 2yr old link wheel that was setup by a SEO co for my site, it has tripod/webs.com/other web 2.0 type sites.. 8 of them. Each web 2.0 site has about 40 links to it and a single link to my site. Is it always best to get rid of all this stuff? I have login details for all the "web 2.0" sites. What if I paid a "designer" $5 to get a bunch of videos and images put on each site and then I wrote some text?
Link Building | | Adsau
They would be useful sites to surfers, I could theme each site. I see all this about hunting down dubious links.. but the other day I went to one of the black style forums and the same people as years ago are selling packages with PDF/Doc submissions, private blog networks same old stuff. It does work as people keep buying and using and reviewing it. If my link wheel hurts then what would stop me pointing it at my competitor? I wouldnt but... Now a site that has a decent link profile, can they get away with a link wheel or two?0 -
Getting Links Removed From ArticlesFactory.com?
I've tried to contact the staff through the online form at http://www.articlesfactory.com/contact.html but never got any reply. Any idea?
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
What do you do if you have been hit by recent Google updates but cannot remove the links?
We have a potential new client who did their own SEO about 6-7 years ago.They ranked really well for years then obviously recently got hit. Some of the links they have are shocking, directories, articles sites etc. They did not use links farms but the links do not look great at all. The problem is they do not have log ins to remove these links manually themselves. Asking for a reconsideration with Google will not get us anywhere due to more recent link building issues we are trying to resolve. They have sent removal requests at least 10 times to these sites but no response. Has anyone overcome these types of issues previously and can give any tips? This would be a good client for us so keen to see what I can do to get them on-board.
Link Building | | tempowebdesign0 -
Should I get these links removed?
Hi, I am trying to clean up the seo of my website. Recently stopped using a professional which might have been using grey hat tactics. I am researching, researching , researching but having trouble pulling the trigger on what I am finding. I have a couple old link exchanges going on. They are quite old. Some of them are on the footer of a website, and therefore bring in a lot of links (ie every time a new page is created). I am wondering if I should ask to get these links removed.. My link profile is pretty bad(at least according to me), nothing extremely bad, but lots of leftover of links coming from petitions, forums etc.. that I can't get removed. I have recently gotten some mention on good website but they have a way around linking directly to any website so I dont get much help from that.. If you guys need my website I can share if need be. thanks!
Link Building | | CassisGroup0 -
Can bad links be removed from a website
An SEO company we contracted with linked us up with many poor quality sites - some in foreign countries and now our site has hundreds and thousands of poor quality links to inappropriate sites.. Is there any way to un-link from these? Thank you!
Link Building | | Barb1230