How to decide which links to remove.
-
I manage the seo for a bunch of different websites. We currently have a problem with links from low quality sources.... way too many of them and then way too much exact match anchor text.
We have a lot of sites that we basically linked together (blog network) and we are in the process of correcting this. We know we have a lot of links we need to remove and/or anchor text we need to rewrite. My question is how do I know which ones to remove and/or edit. I know that having some links from low quality sources isn't bad, or links from some other sites you own, or having some exact match anchor text. I know this isn't all bad, and some of it is expected but we have a LOT of this going on.
So basically I need to make decisions on each and every link as to whether we want to keep it, edit the anchor text, nofollow it, or delete it. I'm just not sure of what the best action is that should to be taken for each link. Any help would be really appreciated.
If you browse around on there you will see what I'm talking about with the low quality links, or if you run it through open site explorer you will really see what I mean
Thank you, I hope to get some responses soon.
-
Hi moregood,
If I were you I would do it the other way around:
I would go over all the existing links asking the following question:
Is this an "editorial" link?
And I would cut out all the rest.
I think It's easier to find out the good ones. There are a lot of reasons for which links could be bad for you, you might not even be aware why they are bad. But the good ones are pretty obvious and way fewer :). I think it's easier to recover from a penalty this way, and the chance to cut something good is pretty low. If you go the way you mentioned and avoid cutting the ones that are in a gray area, you might resubmit the website over and over. It will take a lot of time. Meanwhile you could stick with the good links and invest the rest of time to get more of these
-
One of the first things I would check is if the domain the link is coming from is indexed in Google. This is usually a sign the domain has been penalised.
You can do this with a quick 'site:example.com'
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
-
What is classed as a reciprocal link?
We have a link on a website linking to our homepage and we also are linking to this website from a internal page but not to the same page that is linking to us ( if that makes sense) is this classed as reciprocal?
Link Building | | webguru20140 -
What is the best way to remove a link that redirects to a spammy site?
I've got a new client and I'm trying to clean up their backlinks. There are several links that all redirect to this spam site http://www.expert-lender.com. All of the websites appear to be real, i.e. http://www.sammorganhomes.com/ but the actual links i.e http://www.sammorganhomes.com/wp-fav/backup/supplement/semitruckleasing.html are in a sub-directory and redirect to the spam site. I don't know if these links were from the previous SEO company or if they paid someone to create these or if these sites have been hacked. Can anyone tell me what is going on here and what should I tell these site owners?
Link Building | | Total-Design-Shop0 -
SEO Consulting Agency for Strategy and Link Removal
We need your guidance on SEO Agency we can consult for strategy planning for our websites. We received manual Partial penalty on both domain few months back and since then have seen tremendous fall in rankings for both of the domains. Have been trying to remove all spam links we found out of links we got from webmasters and disavow one's we were not able to get removed. But yet request for penalty removal not accepted. Would appreciate your concern on helping us out if we can take help of some agency for aggressively getting our spam links removed and plan for a better strategy to improve our rankings. Please suggest one of the best in this domain we could reach.
Link Building | | amitjain0 -
Thoughts on using the disavow tool for removed links?
Our website has been penalized by Google for the past few months due to unnatural links. We have spent the past 2 months submitting link removal requests to the domain owners with success. However, the Google Webmaster Tools "links to site" has not updated the list. I understand that they update the list of links as they crawl the website, but it has been 6-8 weeks on a lot of them (mostly our biggest offenders). We attempted to send a reconsideration request anyways, hoping Google would see that even though it is still listed, the link isn't actually there. We received a response that it is still in violation, but I believe it is because the webmaster tools links have not updated and perhaps this is what they go off of. Would you recommend submitting these domains to the disavow tool even though our link has already been removed for the past 6-8 weeks? Or even just listing them with the "#" comment tag so they can see they had been removed? Or would you continue waiting for it to update? Of course, we would like the penalty removed as soon as possible and were concerned that the list hadn't removed these websites the past 6-8 weeks our link had been removed. Example: This domain shows we have 3,397 within this website. It was an affiliate that had this URL forwarding to our pages: http://www.binet.lv/go.pl?PID=49276714O2422 . This no longer forwards to our webpage and the affiliate has been expired, but the GWT still shows them at the top of the links list. I also noticed a lot of sites left the links up, but added the nofollow attribute. These are still coming up in the Links list and does not decipher between which do and do not have nofollow. Could the spammy sites with our links as nofollow still be hurting us? Thanks for any help and recommendations!
Link Building | | shopbloc0 -
New Links - Not Found
Hi there mozzers, Got a quick question regarding link building. I built a fsir bit of links, and was just wondering when these links will be indexed as links pointing to my sites? Silly novice question but been over a month and links still arent being picked up, so was just wondering. Stef
Link Building | | stefanok0 -
Inbound links vs. internal links
Which scenario does more to help SEO - A) An inbound link from a low traffic/low page rank site to my site B) An internal link where one page of my site links to another page on my site
Link Building | | DVanSchepen0 -
How many links per week is too fast in link building?
For a new website/blog how many links per week looks suspicious or hurt the rankings?
Link Building | | aaran1 -
Link Building
I've been hearing about going after niche directories, and my question is most of them have a ton of links on any given page. Is it even worth taking the time to approach these sites knowing they won't pass a lot of link juice?
Link Building | | azguy0