Backlink Audit

[PlanetDISH]

Hello,

I have a quick question for the MOZ readers about my companies current backlink audit. We've noticed many of the backlinks that the Google Webmaster Tool has found come from websites that are no longer in existence or have error messages. Are these websites counting negatively against us or should we ignore them?

Thanks!

Alex Rubin

[Dubs]

Only if notified of unnatural links would I file a reconsideration request.  Focus on building more links and creating new content.

[CHarkins]

If those pages don't exist anymore then they're not going to impact you one way or another.

Unless you've received some sort of unnatural link warning then I would concentrate more on building more good links and interactions than on spending time and resources getting rid of a number of links that you're not sure are hurting you. As long as you are continually building up your content and working to get good links and citations then the site should be moving in the right direction.

Lots of web sites have some "dirty links" and some sites do well in the serps despite outright spamming. A lot of the negative impacts I've seen has to do with tripping some boundary, so if you're working on the good links then you'll be walking back from that line instead of towards it.

[PlanetDISH]

Thanks for the response Craig! We are not going through a reconsideration request but we feel our site is not performing as well as it should be based on our content and link portfolio so we're hoping by removing some spam links from a past SEO organization we may get a boost in the rankings. Has anyone else seen an increase in rankings by removing spam links even if you technically had not been penalized?

[CHarkins]

If the pages are throwing a 404 or the links themselves are nofollowed, then you don't need to worry about them.

If you are putting together a manual link audit report for Google for a reconsideration request, I would include those links along with a column for link status and either set that as "nofollow" or "page generates 404 error" for those pages depending on the error.

If you're not going through a reinclusion request, then you can ignore those as Google will figure out those pages don't exist.