Un Natural Links Removal Strategy

[RuchiPardal]

Hi All,

I want to discuss one of my strategy that i applied on my website to dilute the value of TOXIC links those are coming on my website.

Issue:

• Poor, Spam quality links were created for the home page and some inner pages.
• Google considered those links Unnatural and took manual action
• All rankings were disappeared

Strategy

• Deleted all landing pages those are over linked from spam websites.
• Created new landing pages with some modifications and new content.
• Because home page(index.html) was also penalized by Google, i made the changes in index.html and  put no follow no index tag so that bad links value couldn't pass from index.html to other inner pages (Newly created pages and pages those were not over optimized).
• Created new index.php page. Give option to the user to the Enter the Website from Index.html (Default Home Page) to index.php.
• Blocked all bad URLs (Un Natural Links) through .htaccess file. When user or Google bot will come through those blocked URLs (Un Natural Links), server responses 403 (Access Denied).

The domain for which i did above experiment is http://www.thebaildepot.com/index.php

Now, i have doubts on below points:

• Blocking unnatural links (403, access denied) from .htaccess file will really work?
• No follow no index to default page and than give option to the user to navigate to newly create index.php

I did this experiment around 10 days before still rankings are not coming in Google top 100.

[Carson-Ward]

It happens A lot of links are hard to remove. If you're sure you have a penalty from links, I'd build a list of those links you've tried to remove, submit a disavow file to Google, and explain what happened in a reconsideration request. In that request include where the links came from, what you've done, and how you'll continue to clean things up and play by the rules in the future.

[RuchiPardal]

Hi Carson,

Thanks for your reply. As i earlier mentioned that link removal process it not working. I tried many times but all the times Google rejected are reconsideration request. I don't know where i am lacking.

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Ruchi,

I think your approach to removing landing/sub pages is fine, but ultimately less effective than removing links. If the page has nothing but bad links pointing to it, I'd say kill it off (you can just give a 410 response) and refresh your content as best you can. Cut the landing pages, but also try to cut the links at their source.

The root, however, is going to be tricky. noindex/nofollowing your home page is not something I'd suggest. It might not work because Google will just assume index.html is the same page and count the links towards the index anyway. I won't worry about the theory on that, because it could be worse if it does work. You'd also be blocking any good links pointing to your root page. It's also a pretty terrible user experience if you direct users away.

Definitely do not try to block links in .htaccess. This doesn't work - at best it prevents Google from crawling your site on that occasion. At worst it sends Google the message that your site isn't reliably online.

Try to remove all of the links you've built, starting with the lowest-authority and anchor-text-heavy links. If your removal fails, consider using the disavow tool on spammy links. Hope this helps

[RuchiPardal]

Thanks Federico,

I agree with you but we have already tried to remove most of the unnatural links and filed reconsideration request with proper evidences. We find out unnatural links through different tools such as Google Webmaster tools, Cognitive SEOs etc. but all the times Google rejects our reconsideration request with the reason that our website is still receiving unnatural links.In the reconsideration request response Google also shares some sample of unnatural links.

The worst part is that after lots of deep analysis, we still not able to find out the list of whole unnatural links.

[FedeEinhorn]

I don't think you are taking a good approach...

Instead of noindexing the pages, or blocking those that have bad backlinks, you should fix the backlinks.

Run a complete analysis on the entire backlink profile, go over each and every link trying to remove it by contacting the Webmaster, document everything you do on the process.

Once you are left with those link that you don't want and the webmaster didn't remove, create and upload a disavow file listing all those links.

Then you can proceed to send a reconsideration request, explaining Google what happened, what you did to fix it and send the proof of your work.

If you continue with your strategy, you basically need to create several new pages to block any bad link, and wait for the penalty to expire (nobody knows how long it takes). Then if and only if you removed all those pages that have bad backlinks you won't be penalized again, so this could take months, or even years... it isn't a good strategy at all...