How Do I Know which links are bad?
-
Hi All
I have currently got a Manual Action on my Webmaster Tools account due to some unnatural links and I am in the process of seeding out the poor links with a view to having them removed or disavowed.
Other than looking at each link individually to see if it looks relevant or spammy. Any ideas on how I can gauge which links are bad and which aren't??
-
There is a lot that goes into dealing with this issue.
You will need some good tools that can be found here http://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/tools/
You need to focus on dofollow links and this may come as a surprise but also links that appear missing.
Download the latest links from WMT, Ahrefs & majestic.
Combine them and use excel or "ScrapeBox DupeRemove" available from the link above to remove and duplicates.
Use "Blackhatlinks.com Free Dofollow / Nofollow Link Checker" to see if the link is dofollow / nofollow or notfound for the webmaster tools links.
Once done you can start to look at what is good and bad.
Under a manual penalty you are under review by a real person and they are meticulous, they will make you remove links you never even created and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Almost all links are bad in Googles eyes, this includes urls, brand mentions and non optimized anchor text like click here.
You need to attack it hard and remove as much as possible, because a penguin refresh only comes around every 6 months, the next will probably be in Feb or April.
Remove anything that has optimized anchor text no matter what or try to get the text changed if its an incredible link.
The most creditable links are ones where multiple sites are mentioned that include your competitors in some form of comparison on a forum, article blog etc... Almost all others are trash.
Also some directories are ok, like dmoz, yahoo dir etc...
OK I Mentioned before about missing links, you will find links in WMT where the link does not appear anymore, BUT in the case of a directory it may have moved down to page 3 or 4 when it was on page 1 or 2 when first crawled. The link is still on the site and if you see the site itself is trash, add it to the disavow.
Dont bother adding links to the disavow file, add domains.
example:
domain:xyz.com
domain:abc.com
This will ensure you capture all links on those domains regardless if the move around.
If you do not want to do this all yourself there are many tools out there, like Link Detox and rmoov.
Feel free to ask me any questions or send me some examples if you are not sure.
Its a horrible process I have had to do it myself and helped many others,all with success!
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
-
When link building yourself where would you advise are the best places to add links?
Hi I am not having much success with SEO companies so am looking at link building and doing SEO myself. Where would you advise are the best places to add links? Also is it better to add links to specific pages or just to the home page? Thanks in advance
Link Building | | Briggzy0 -
Disavow Links - how do you know if it's worked?
I asked another SEO company to analysis my link structure (as I was too busy!) As I was flat lining on some work I was doing. They said I potentially had an algo penalty and that i need to do a disavow , even though I had no messages from Google saying I had unnatural links. stupidly I agreed to the disavow. Looking at Webmasters tools it seems they've submitted a bunch of links. Since they've done this traffic dropped by 60%, ranking dropped massively. In google Webmasters all the links which are meant to be removed are still showing. How do I know if the actual disavow has been done? And should I do a reconsideration request? Even though Google hadn't flagged an issue ??
Link Building | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Indirect Link Earning via dofollow Links In News Articles
Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus. I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute. Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords: http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/ Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort. However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here: http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/ Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS. If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page. To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page. Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Link Building | | bionewstx2 -
Why aren't links to my site from YouTube showing up in my link reports?
Our company is paying for a service to create hundreds of videos/month for us with links back to our primary domain. If I go to YouTube I see the videos with the links, but YouTube does not show in my link reports. Why not?
Link Building | | jtroia0 -
Why does my site only have 4 internal followed links/internal links?
When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
There is a New link to my Site but I can see it on link report ?why ?
Hi I found out using link campaign and Open site explorer that my competitors where getting links from this page http://www.visitgreece.gr/en/activities/land_sports/golf So I conatc the admins and added our golf courses too Is the dunes and the bay course in the middle of the page But this happened 3 weeks ago and still this linking domain is not appaering in my campaign why is that any ideas ? does it take so much time to appera to SEOmoz ? Or the problem is because they are linking 2 diffrent sites ? my site is www.costanavarinogolf.com Thanks a lot in advance for your help
Link Building | | grzontan0 -
Link from each page or only from homepage
In addition to my main site (A), I also have another website (B) (question/answer) type, which has over 400,000 indexed pages in Google. I'm trying to do linkbuilding for a.com: should I link from B to A ? should I place a link only on the homepage of B? should I place a link on homepage of B and each of the 400,000 pages to A? should place multiple links on B to A.com/subdirectories/ thank you.
Link Building | | limens0
