Should I Remove Thousands of Bad Links over a Short Time or Long Time?
-
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
-
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.
-
Drop them like they are hot.
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Page redirected too many times
Hello, How can we solve the following error : This page isn't working ** redirected you too many times.** It's very frustrating. I have cleared the cookies. Still, the problem persists. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Johnroger0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Why is my crawl taking so long?
Hi There, My crawl for albertcuyp.nl is taking very long, it started on the 10th of april. I don't know whats going on but i think 2 weeks for a crawl is extremely long. Can you help me?
Technical SEO | | KnowHowww0 -
How do you take down a link
Salut from Sunny wetherby UK 🙂 Having just watched a whiteboard fri clip all about the "Penguin Update" i want to know how to take down a link. I feel a site ive been working on has been pecked by the penguin. I did build inbound links on a specific commercial term and shiver me timbers is dropped oof the SERPS from top 5 to ziltch, yiles!! So my questiuon is please:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
if you find an inbound link using a target term how do you kill it? Thanks in advance :_)0 -
Is there a tool to figure out bad backlinks
With the new changes to the google algorithm. I'm trying to figure out what links google may think are hurting my site. Any thoughts? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MQMORAN23230 -
If people link to you incorrectly, does it hurt you?
In Google WM tools I'm seeing so many 404 crawl errors but they're all from other sites linking to us incorrectly, which I can't do anything about. Will this hurt us somehow as far as SEO goes? The logical thing would be that it would hurt the site doiing the linking but it does come up in OUR WM tools, so it makes me wonder.
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
External link optimization
The company I work for sells software online. We have deals learning institutes that allow their students to use our software for next to nothing. These learning institutes, which are usually quite strong domains, link to our sign in area. Nice way to get powerful links hey… or is it? There are a couple of problems with these links: They all link to a subdomain (signin.domain.com) The URLs also contain unique identifiers (so that we know which institute they are coming from). Meaning they all link to different signin URLs. (eg. signin.domain.com/qwerty, signin.domain.com/qwerta, signin.domain.com/qwerts, etc. ) So all these links aren't as effective as they could be (or at all?). In a perfect SEO world these links would all point to the start page, however, due to the fact that our start page is of a commercial set up this would run the risk of communicating the wrong idea to the institutes and their students. So… are there any extremely brilliant pro mozzers that have a savvy idea how set this up in a more SEO friendly way? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | henners0
