External Backlinks - Should I remove/disavow external blog posts done by SEO company?
-
Last year my company hired an SEO company to build backlinks for targeted achor text keywords. It turns out that they wrote average to below average blog posts that had content related to my business, but that were placed on odd websites, not related to my business. They did this for about one year before I fired them.
Should I try to get each of those blog posts removed and then disavow them? If the external links back to my site are nofollow then it is my understanding that I don't really need to worry about them...is that accurate?
Is it too risky to keep any external backlinked content alive when it is on a site that is unrelated to my business?
-
Hi AJ,
I would compile a list of the stuff they made
I would then take a look at the sites. Odds are, some are actually good sites with good traffic.
You should be able to get a few good ones at least. You can opt to change the content. Keep those and remove the links on the rest.
IF they had unlinked brand mentions, just remove those mentions as well. No need to take down the whole thing
If you want, you can actually replace the links and point it to one of your employees blogs, a social property or somethin' that isn't really ranking or has nothing to lose - Just being honest here because simply repurposing it instead of scrapping a whole year's worth of your "investment" is always better in my eyes.
-
Low quality content on irrelevant sites, I guess this is enough information to make a decision about removing those posts (or atleast links from the posts).
The process will be same, contact the bloggers and see if they are willing to remove the post (or atleast a link from the post) incase yes awesome and in the case of NO, just include the link in the disavow file and submit it to Google Webmaster Tool.
Hope this helps!
-
You might contact the firm that placed the links and see if they can remove them. If they were done in profiles or by creating accounts with passwords, hopefully they can remove them. It can be very difficult to get links removed and time consuming if you must do it by contacting the webmasters. And most of them will not respond. But Google does state they want you to attempt to clean up the links. Have you checked GWMT for warnings? Even without warnings you can be penalized by algorithms. A lot of info on that here on Moz worth reading.
I am sure you will get great advice here, but those links are not doing you any good and should be removed and disavowed. You are correct that the nofollows won't hurt, but I would want all the spammy links gone if it were my site. It is not so much that links on sites unrelated to your business are necessarily bad, but those that are clearly manipulative (like anchor text) are pretty obvious to Google. Nuke 'em all.
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
-
A lot of blogs use wordpress or blogspot, are these blogs still useful for SEO in terms of linkbuilding, or should they be avoided?
I am very new to linkbuilding and SEO as a whole, so please forgive my ignorance. Reaching out to bloggers is a common tactic, but I've found a lot of people tend to blog with the assistance of wordpress or blogspot. I was wondering whether these blogs are still useful for SEO or if it is best to avoid them? Thanks in advance, Lewis
Link Building | | Samstore0 -
Is it possible to un-disavow a link if we later decide that it isnt spammy / undesirable ?
Is it possible to un-disavow a link if we later decide that it isnt spammy / undesirable ? (i know best practice is to get it right first time, but worst comes to worst is it undo able ?)
Link Building | | jpeg800 -
Is there any BAD SEO implications to acquiring backlinks from customers?
What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was? Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us. Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link? Thank you! I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!
Link Building | | Deacyde1 -
How relevant are citations to SEO?
'How much do citations help your seo in view of the direction that google seems to be headed where content is king? Should the citations not be relevant to your site?'.
Link Building | | arthureray0 -
Hidden Backlinks
Hi, I hope someone can help me with this. We have a competitor who appears to be ranking No1 for a competitive search term with a very lame site and above some authoritative sites. He has been here for some time as well. When we check out his back link profile through OSE, Majestic and Ahrefs they show as only 3 backlinks from no PR sites. However, someone pointed out that they could be using a link network that is blocking every crawler apart from Google, Yahoo and BIng. I would like to know if there is a way to confirm this. For instance I know that we can use screaming frog to mimic Googlebot, however, if there a way to reveal the real backlinks to a site like this using any tools. Thanks
Link Building | | kirstyseo0 -
Can't remove and can't disavow...
Wondering if anyone could help me. A client is suffering a Google penalty at the moment which is harming their performance. That said it is properly the best penalty they could have got..the site has a penalty which is stopping them ranking as high on keywords which they have been spamming links for. I say the best penalty they could have got because, other than these keywords, the site is still performing as well as before in the engines. Have been trying to clear up the backlinks for the past couple of months and just when I think im winning I discover some 32,000 blog comments on one domain 6 weeks or so ago!! - [http://www. iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265](http://www.iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265) example url, I broke it on purpose as to not make it a backlink With that many links i will not even try and contact the site, I put in the disavow in google that there is no way I can get these removed and explained it etc, however, they, again, rejected the reconsideration request saying they are still not happy with the links. At a bit of a loss here. It's starting to look that the best approach will be to write off the half a dozen terms and go a little more long tail. The site will not rank for (this is an example as would not want to give the client away) door knockers. They used to be first page but now are page four. However they remain page one for terms such as brass door knockers, cheap door knockers, chrome door knockers etc. In WMT ranking report they have hits from 1200 words ranking in the top 5 in the past 30 days and 3000 in the top ten. Im a considering trying to up the rankings of these words at the expense of the ones which we cannot seem to get the penalty off. Any thoughts please.
Link Building | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
How to SEO how-to website?
I've launched the website www.ComoFazer.com.br, which is a Brazilian how-to website (the domain is literally how to in Portuguese). How can I get to the top rankings? My strategy so far: made all the on-page SEO stuff put 4 sidebar links in family websites bought the $90 package in GetLinksPro for 100 dofollow links spent about $100 in Facebook Ads to get 2k followers there I want help regarding SEO and strategy for this kind of sites.
Link Building | | kikocherman0 -
Should we BackLink to Guest Post ?
Hi, I have been actively doing guest blogging for last few weeks . But the page authority , moz Rank and moz Trust of my guest posts appear 0 as those posts have their own pages on blogs with snippets of posts on home page. I wanted to ask if i should backlink to my guest posts to increase the authority, mR and mT of pages. Those posts are already appearing as backlinks in webmaster tools but if i backlink to my posts to increase mR and mT, then will it also increase the juice passed by backlinks in those posts to landing pages on my site ? Thanks,
Link Building | | shaz_lhr0