Negative SEO to inner page: remove page or disavow links?
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Someone decided to run a negative-SEO campaign, hitting one of the inner pages on my blog I noticed the links started to pile up yesterday but I assume there will be more to come over the next few days.
The targeted page is of little value to my blog, so the question is: should I remove the affected page (hoping that the links won't affect the entire site) or to submit a disavow request?
I'm not concerned about what happens to the affected page, but I want to make sure the entire site doesn't get affected as a result of the negative-SEO.
Thanks in advance.
Howard
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Thanks Marie. I went ahead and deleted that page and submitted a disavow request. Hopefully that will prevent any future issues.
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If you're transferring the content then make sure that the old pages are out of the index before you get the new page up. Â I had a situation where I consulted with a client who was starting a new site because the old was hit severely by Penguin. Â He bought a new domain and we moved all the content to there. Â We did no 301 redirects from the old to the new and there were no links from the old to the new at all. Â Yet, a couple of weeks later, the WMT backlinks to the new content showed all of the same links as the old site! Â They all said, "Via...oldsite.com". Â It was like Google recognized a canonical here and attributed the links to the new page.
The old site was gone, but was still in the Google cache. Â We had to manually remove each old url using the url removal tool and then the problem resolved.
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Thanks Chris and Marie! I was thinking of doing a 401 (page permanently moved) and transferring the content to a new page with a new url.
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If this is a page that is not important to you then I'd definitely remove it. Â Removing the page is the same as removing the links in Google's eyes. Â Just be sure that you don't redirect that url to another on your site.
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Howard, If the page isn't of importance to you, yes, you could just remove the page. Â You could also change the url of the page and let all of those links unresolved. Â If the links are not targeting a live page on your domain they won't have an impact on your domain.
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