Toxic Link Removal-Better to Pay an SEO Firm or Can I Do It Myself?

[Kingalan1]

Hi Jen:

Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. They are of the opinion that it is imperative to remove the toxic domains.

The fee for toxic link removal is about $3,000.I would prefer to save the $3,000 but would prefer not to take the risk of screwing up my ranking if this is a complex procedure best left to SEO professionals. My assumption is that link removal will involve  identifying the toxic domains, requesting removal and eventually submitting a Google disavow request.

Can I do this myself or is there a big risk of screwing it up? Assuming it is safe for me to remove toxic links, would anyone suggest  software of tools for doing so?

Thanks so much.
Alan

[HiveDigitalInc]

What she said.

[HiveDigitalInc]

Hey, thanks for the positive remarks. Marie Haynes is a rockstar in her own regard though in terms of link removals, and one of the few people I would put up against my own team

Did want to give you a heads up though, we have some pretty big / awesome updates rolling out in Remove'em in the next 2-3 weeks so stay tuned.

[MarieHaynes]

My site dropped in rankings in April 2011 and never completely recovered.

Are you sure it was April 2011, not 2012?  April 2012 was when Penguin initially rolled out.  If it was April 2011 then there is something else going on.  Still, if you've got bad links they should be removed, but I'd want to be digging in to see what else could be happening.  For the rest of this answer though I'm going to assume you meant 2012.

Regarding the Google penalty, I never received any sort of written notice on Google Webmaster Tools.

The warnings you get in WMT are only for manual penalties.  Penguin is an algorithmic change where the algorithm decides that it doesn't trust the quality of the links pointing to your site.  Here's good information on the difference between the two:  http://moz.com/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too.

**The SEO firm is confident they can remove around 60% of the toxic links. **

The only way I could see this happening is if you have a large number of links in certain groups of directories that will do bulk link removal for a fee.  When my team emails site owners to get links removed we tend to get, on average 15% of the links removed. (We disavow the remaining bad ones.) I'd ask them how they can guarantee 60%.  There are some companies that have agreements with directory and blog networks so it is possible to do this if the majority of your links come from these places.

Furthermore they are not at this point addressing the "suspicious" links.

That's tough for me to comment on without seeing a few of the suspicious links.  If these links are algorithmically determined to be suspicious then I'd be worried.  But if they are links that are just debatable whether Google would find them bad or not then it might be a different story.

I'd like to point out that there are only 445 domains linking to my site. Would it be possible to overcome the penalty by building thousands of high quality links over time?

Question - How are you going to do that?  These days, any way that I can think of to build thousands of links is going to be considered unnatural by Google.  There are some black and grey hatters that are currently getting away with link building on this scale using some smart tactics that currently work, but most of them are doing this to churn and burn sites that will eventually get penalized.  Now, if your site was able to attract thousands of links naturally then it's possible you could overcome Penguin even without doing link removal.  However, what John Mueller says is that Penguin would always be an anchor that was pulling the site down or in another place he said, "It would be like driving with the handbrake on."  The way I look at Penguin, it's like Google places a trust level on your links.  So, if, overall the link profile stinks, then they don't want to rank you well.  Now, let's say out of your 445 domains linking to you, 300 of them were unnatural but then you were able to attract a couple of thousand good links, I suppose it's possible that those good ones would be enough to overcome the bad ones.  But, you'd still do better getting rid of the bad ones so that Google trusts you again. And again, getting thousands of natural links is no easy feat.

**I am also concerned that removing these links before adding new ones will really cause my traffic to drop **

If you're removing/disavowing the right links then that's not a concern.  The unnatural links have already stopped counting towards your site so removing them won't make a difference.  But if you remove links that are actually good ones then yes, you will likely see a decline.

**Is there any kind of action that I can ask the SEO provider to take to ensure they will be removing the bad links? **

So here's the hard truth about Penguin.  There are lots of people who know in theory what should be done to escape Penguin but there are very few people who are successfully helping websites to recover.  I know that's not what you want to hear but the truth is that there is a lot that we still don't know.  I am extremely obsessed about Penguin to the point where some nights I can't sleep because all I can think of is theories of what is going on and how to overcome it.  I have read absolutely everything that Google has said or printed about Penguin.  I have read almost every article anyone has written on the web about Penguin and I have studied hundreds of Penguin hit sites.  My point in telling you all of this is not to gloat or to try to win you as a client, but to tell you that even though I have done all this I still can't guarantee I can help a site recover from Penguin.  Some sites that I have worked on have escaped Penguin, but even with all of this knowledge and experience, there are some sites that have not shown recovery.  When I take on Penguin clients, at this point I can't guarantee anything. (See below for more reasons why this happens.) If you are working with someone who can guarantee Penguin recovery then I'd look elsewhere.

Ask for references.  Don't settle for just seeing analytics data because that can be fudged, but ask to speak with clients who have had Penguin success because of working with this company.  Don't let them hide behind an NDA.  I have NDAs with all of my clients but I still have many that will happily give a reference.

However, it's still possible for companies that are really knowledgable about Penguin to not have many success stories because there are two parts to Penguin:

1. The ability to clean up the link profile so that Google trusts your links again.

2. The ability to attract links to the site (or the presence of a good number of natural links already.)

Here is more on what Google says about this: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/penguin-recovery-is-possible-but-cleaning-up-links-is-not-enough/

One last thing, I am particularly concerned by your last paragraph. Are you saying that it is very unlikely that Google will lift this penalty no matter how many new links are built of how many bad links get removed; that the domain my domain is in a sense "blacklisted"? That since the links were never very good, Google will never remove the penalty? If that is so, there is no sense in investing in link clean up.

No, what I am saying here is that you could potentially do all of the link cleanup and convince Google that your site is now trustworthy when it comes to links, but if there is no base of good links present then your site will not make much improvement.  If you have 445 domains linking to you and 5% are considered good ones that means you've got 22 domains linking to you with good followed links.  But, often this number includes links that don't really count for anything such as a link from alexa.com.  So, you could potentially have an extremely small number of natural links.  In some niches, not many links are needed in order to compete, especially if it's a local business.  But, if there is any sort of competition then links from 22 domains is not likely to be enough to help you rank well.  With that being said, we don't really know if those "suspicious" links are good ones or not so my numbers could be off.

So, it's not that you would be blacklisted or could never get the Penguin flag off of your site.  It's just that I am concerned that there may not be much left to prop your site up once the work is done.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Marie:

Thanks for your very thorough response.

My site dropped in rankings in April 2011 and never completely recovered. I had a site audit and they really stressed the urgency of removing toxic links to my site.

For the first time I looked at links using Majestic SEO and noticed that most are from low quality directories and many have the same IP address. Also I have seen Domain Authority on MOZ drop from 38 to 27 in the last year. Page authority at the moment is 38.

The audit (from a reputable MOZ approved SEO vendor) found the site to be pretty good technically (unique content, fast download, no Google or MOZ errors, etcetera). I think they checked the links with software, not manually.

Regarding the Google penalty, I never received any sort of written notice on Google Webmaster Tools.

The SEO firm is confident they can remove around 60% of the toxic links. They in no way promise to remove all. So from what you are saying, even if a few remain I may be in trouble. Furthermore they are not at this point addressing the "suspicious" links.

I'd like to point out that there are only 445 domains linking to my site. Would it be possible to overcome the penalty by building thousands of high quality links over time? I am also concerned that removing these links before adding new ones will really cause my traffic to drop (I receive about 4,000 unique visitors via search each month).

Is there any kind of action that I can ask the SEO provider to take to ensure they will be removing the bad links? I would hate to spend $3,000 and find the site still penalized by Google for bad links.

One last thing, I am particularly concerned by your last paragraph. Are you saying that it is very unlikely that Google will lift this penalty no matter how many new links are built of how many bad links get removed; that the domain my domain is in a sense "blacklisted"? That since the links were never very good, Google will never remove the penalty? If that is so, there is no sense in investing in link clean up.

THANKS,
Alan

[BlueprintMarketing]

I agree with everything EGOL has said.

I hate to ask you this but did you contact this company because you are having problems or did they contact you?

Just so you know if you got a e-mail saying that your site has It's something wrong with it and they can fix it for X amount of dollars spam it right away. Those people are the bottom of the barrel that make everyone that does white hat search look terrible.

If they're very reputable firm am sure they would not mind being mentioned here. It also makes a big difference if you actually contacted them. And of course how is your site doing overall?

Respectfully,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think you have so much good information already stated that the only thing I can recommend is a service called removeem http://www.removeem.com/

They are owned by  Virante a company that is recommended by Moz the reason I think their good pic is they have 2 choices one you can have them do the work which I think you might want to lean towards that this is a very serious thing that you're doing. Other than that you can save money and use their system but make the work a little bit easier on you. When you are removing links in this manner you want to be extremely careful that you do not hurt yourself in Google's eyes.

I would wait anymore but everything has already been said.

All the best,

Thomas

[MarieHaynes]

So, here's an important question - why are you doing this?  Do you have a manual penalty?  Have you been affected by the Penguin algorithm?  Are you seeing declining rankings and don't know why?  Or are you just taking preventative action?

In either case, IMO, paying $3000 for link removal is not the answer.  While it's important to deal with bad links, the actual act of removing links is not the most important thing.  The most important thing is to identify which ones are the bad ones...and for most sites that's not easy.  However, if the $3000 is to have someone who is experienced in disavow work manually review your backlinks, make suggestions for removal/disavowing and file your disavow then this is probably quite a reasonable fee.  If you're asking whether reviewing your links yourself is a good idea I'd say no.  I have trained a good number of people to do link audits and I find that it takes several projects before my team members are good at determining whether a link is a good one, and even then they usually have a lot of questions for me.

If you've got a manual penalty, then making attempts to remove the bad links is something that needs to be done.  However, Google does not expect you to pay for link removal. In this recent webmaster central hangout (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdepLGhG-V0&feature=c4-overview&list=UUthrUiuJUtFSXBUp48D8bAA), Google employee Mariya Moeva, says the following "DO NOT PAY FOR LINK REMOVAL! That is what the disavow tool is for."  It's at around the 13 minute mark.  In previous hangouts, John Mueller has said that if you are trying to remove a manual penalty and someone asks for money to remove a link then don't pay it, make a note in your spreadsheet that the site owner wanted money and then disavow the link.

If you're dealing with Penguin, it's still up for debate whether you need to remove links or just disavow.  No webspam team member is going to review your link removal efforts because it's an algorithm.  Most people who do a lot of Penguin work (myself included) feel that it's best to remove links where possible but that disavowing does a pretty good job.  I still recommend removing as many as possible because there are things about the disavow tool that are cloudy.  For example, it can take 6 months or longer for some sites to get recrawled and disavowed, so removing that link would deal with it sooner.  Also, if you don't format your disavow file correctly then you could have problems.

So, you've got 40% of your links that are "suspicious".  Was this a manual audit or an audit done with software?  I find that the automated tools do a decent job at finding the really bad links but usually things marked as suspicious, and often even healthy links are not good ones because there are some things that are not going to be picked up with a tool.  If it was a manual review by someone who regularly does link audits then you'll need to get their opinion on what to do with the 40% of the links that are suspicious.  This is important because the only sites that I have seen get out of a manual penalty or get out of Penguin trouble are ones that have addressed close to 100% of their bad links.  So, if you've got 10,000 bad links and you remove 5,000 of them but there are still 4,000 or so unnatural ones there then you probably haven't accomplished anything.

The other important thing here is the fact that only 5% of your links have been identified as good ones.  If you have a partial action manual penalty or if you are affected by Penguin, then, if you do the right work to get out of the penalty or look better in the eyes of Penguin, you're not likely to see much change.  The only sites that I have seen actually do well after penalty removal or escaping Penguin are ones that have a good base of natural links and have the ability to attract good links in the future.  Your previous rankings were based on the power of links that Google will never count again.

I'm not sure if I've helped or confused you even further.  Feel free to ask questions.

Marie

[Burto]

I would give it a shot yourself, You can do much of it yourself and even outsource small time consuming tasks. I had this same problem as you with my website Dates Of Asia and even sourcing other contractors to do this for me my reconsideration request was still denied so after spending the money I decided to do it myself. I found that this approach is much better as you know yourself some of your links that are good links but somebody else might consider them to be bad links.

First off read this post it is what helped me to help myself and ultimately gave me the motivation to do this all myself.  Ultimate Guide To Google Penalty Removal

Work your way through this, I found that Link Detox was essential in this. Basically you can export the results to an excel spreadsheet and then pay somebody else to attempt contact of the links you want removed. Keep the spreadsheet updated. Then pay somebody to go through and check each link if it is still there, if it is then add it to the disavow tool. Write up your re-consideration request and include details of what you have done with examples.

It really is not that hard, it is just time consuming but for those long tedious tasks you can just pay somebody else to do those. It is much cheaper than paying $3,000 and I am sure that money will be better spent elsewhere in development or advertising.

Hope I could be of help.

[Kingalan1]

Well, OK looks like I need to bite the bullet....

Is there an objective way that I can identify toxic links, that I can detemine if in fact they need to be removed? The SEO firm has identified  45% of incoming links as "Toxic", 50% as suspicious and 5% as healthy. There are a total of 1,500 links coming from 450 domains.

About 130 have a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero and a citation flow of zero.  So they don't look great.

While I don't want to be too skeptical I am concerned that the SEO firm may want to generate revenue when perhaps it is not necessary to remove these links.

Alan

[EGOL]

Need to do what I can myself so I can invest in services that add the highest value.

Right,.  I agree.

Is this out of the league of someone who is not an SEO pro but is tech savvy?

If I think that the job is important to do and it is something that only needs to be done one time, then I would hire someone to save me the time of learning and the risk of doing it wrong.  If it is a job that will be done many times then I would learn how to do it and save money like you want to do.

But, if this company is simply saying... "you should have your links cleaned"... then I would be skeptical about doing that work because every site that I own that has never had any linkbuilding done by anyone still has a lot of crap links.  Those links have come from scrapers and spammers publishing mashup sites, cobbled directories and other crap that they produce.

[Kingalan1]

I get it,  however there are varying levels of complexity and there is software such a link detox that can simplify the process.

Is this out of the league of someone who is not an SEO pro but is tech savvy?

Link building, development of content strategy, local SEO, link removal, duplicate content removal can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars or more. Need to do what I can myself so I can invest in services that add the highest value.

Thanks,
Alan

[EGOL]

If I need a new garage door I can replace it myself and spend a ton of time learning how to do it, a ton more time actually doing the job, and a lot more time tweaking it the next several years because I didn't get it quite right.   And, I would probably have to buy a lot of tools.   Then the thing would probably fall on my car or my kids.

So, when I don't quite know what I am doing, I hire a pro and drink beer while he does the work. 

But, before I hire the guy, I make sure he knows what he is doing... then I can enjoy the beer.

They are of the opinion that it is imperative to remove the toxic domains

But one question... Is your site having problems?   If it is not having problems I might not have this SEO company remove any links.