Should I Remove Thousands of Bad Links over a Short Time or Long Time?
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Hey Moz Community!
I've got a website that has hundreds of thousands of old links that don't really offer any great content. They need to be removed. Would it be a better idea to remove them in batches of 5000,10000, or more over a long time... or remove them all at the same time because it doesn't matter?
Cheers,
Alex
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Hi Alex,
When it comes to bad links pointing to your site, definitely remove them as an when you can (i.e. immediately, acknowledging that it will take time to contact every linking webmaster and negotiate the link removal). If you are going to suffer any ill effects in rankings from removing bad links (which does happen if Google was passing PageRank through those links), it's still best to get this done sooner rather than later. What you do not want is bad links that haven't been noticed to suddenly be picked up upon, resulting in a manual penalty.
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Drop them like they are hot.
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I'm with William on this. There is nothing to be gained by undertaking this slowly. Matt Cutts said in a video that if you have a lot of bad links, or don't really know where links came from, then just disavow them. Google are realistic as well and know that you can't be expected to contact thousands of domain owners.
But do make sure they are bad - I have seen disavow files sent to me to look over, only to find that some links were actually really good.
-Andy
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If you know for sure they are all bad links, then do it all at once and get it done with. Maybe you'll see an increase in traffic.
Once you disavow something, you're not likely to get it back, so keep that in mind. From the sounds of it, these links are obviously bad, so you shouldn't have to worry.
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