Links Removed from Site but not Google Webmaster Tools
-
I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days.
After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed.
Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website?
Thank you in advance,
Kyle -
Kyle, if you have done a domain level disavow, there's no need to do another URL by URL.
We are seeing disavow take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months to take effect. Wish I could offer better news, but it looks like you're in a hurry-up-and-wait mode. -
Hey Kyle,
I've not read through all the answers here so apologies if this has already been mentioned but have you used Googles Disavow?
Google says "If you believe your site's ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough"
Am pretty sure that as long as you have removed all unnatural links and you have added them through Disavow they will eventually be removed from GWT... they can take sometime unfortunately..
Hope this helps
-
Gotcha, i already disavowed their entire domain do you think it would be more effective disavowing each URL that they have listed in GWT?
-
cache is in the little drop down to the right of the url in searches (usually).
Theres no way to force google to go and reindex the page in full, if its been 6 months and they are still definitely the cause of problems disavow them - whilst not the ideal solution at this point in time it can work. but i advise only doing it if it definitely that site or set of sites causing you issues. you may find google is ignoring those links now but the index just hasnt been updated. Also there is no telling how out of date sections of GWT are.
-
Thanks for the response Andy!
Yes we have seen a decent amount of links get removed, close to 600. However none from this blog network that was the largest culprit. It was just driving me crazy that we got them removed but Google is still showing them there if i do a query of site:blog.com + "brand name"
I just wish there was a way to make Google recrawl that blog indepth rather than waiting, which on that point, what happened to Google cached pages?
-
do the links still show in OSE and majestic?
GWT can take 6 months to show a drop of links in my experience, and sometimes longer - it basically will only show it once its revisited the site to makesure the page or link doesn't exist. This means if you are one of say a million links on the page it will take a long time to get reindexed because its huge and likely to be low value - but that link wont disappear until its been reindexed or disavow has been accepted for that page.
Have you spotted any dropping links at all?
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
-
Does an external link to an image file on my site help my SEO?
I found a few websites that are displaying images from my site. Curiously, they have also linked these images to the source image file on my website. I found these because Moz showed these sites in my list of backlinks. I assume that means it impacts my Domain Authority. But does this actually help me in search engines since it's not linking to a page on my site?
Link Building | | AlexLenhoff0 -
Back links from sites like Wix & Wordpress.
Sorry for the newb question. If you get a back-link from a blogger on wordpress will you get any of the 'link juice' from the platform. i.e) from the Wordpress site. I'm talking about bloggers whose URL's would be like...www.wordpress.com/bloggersitename I imagine not, but it would be good to know for sure. Isaac.
Link Building | | isaac6630 -
Is are Scoopon type sites a good place to get a link?
We have noticed that our competitors have links with equality from sites like this: http://www.groupon.com.au/ Scoopon type sites like this can be an effective way to generate sales for a business, I'm just wondering if these types of sites also have added value for SEO as sites like these do have a strong Domain Authority? Any thoughts on this subject would be most appreciated. Thanks!
Link Building | | Gavo0 -
Free tool which includes a link back to my site
On one of my sites I provide a free tool to other webmasters to use that allows them to copy some code to use the free tool on their website and under the tool on it says "Powered by: mysite.co.uk" with a link to "mysite.co.uk". Now I have no real control over which sites can come and use this free tool (a tool to test how fast an internet connection is), on the whole though it is aimed at a specific niche but a range of sites do use it which means good or crap sites can pick up the free code to place into their sites. The link to mysite.co.uk is now always mysite.co.uk as the anchor text, I used to use the websites name (which is the actual name of the URL - link to site at end of post) so the links were keyword rich but only to my sites genuine name, however I now just leave it as the URL to my site. I am not aiming to do anything untowards with the linking other than to get the acknowledgement that it was provided for free by my site, however I'm wondering if google etc will be able to tell they are natural and not dodgy? My site is: http://bit.ly/MsNQwS (n.b. a new improved test is being created before anyone says it's not accurate). 🙂
Link Building | | Wardy0 -
Too many links from one site?
In webmaster tools in 'links to your site' I have a totla of 819 links but 580 have appeared from one site. Is this bad for SEO?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Pursuing Links on Sites You Have a Link From
Is it a bad idea to spend resources to get a second link from a site that already links to you? It seems like the marginal value of each additional link is much smaller than the first link.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Remove Unatural Links
We hired a SEO firm to build links for us two months ago, and now, we received "unatural link" warning from Google. SEO firm informed that they have taken steps to remove these links. But, we don't think we should trust and depend on them for that. We want to be on it and would like your advise for the following three questions: how to determina whether a link is "natural" or "unatural"? We want to make sure we don't remove the natural ones We saw 933 links from Blogspot.com, that for sure do not look natural, how do we go about to remove it? Based on SEO firm's report, certain links have be removed, but, it is still showing on Google Webmaster, should we give it sometime to crawl and confirm?
Link Building | | ypl0 -
SEOs and web developers frequently leave links to their site in the footer of their clients' sites. Does this negatively impact the site with the links?
Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site? Has anyone experienced problems doing this?
Link Building | | KatMouse2