524 links from a site unknown to me - contact then disavow?
-
Hi there,
Google Webmaster Tools 'Who links the most' informs me there are 534 links from a site called econintersect.com linking to my site and 102 links from similar pages.com.
I have never requested these links and am keen to know if they are harming my site due to poor link quality?
Simon
-
Really really helpful thanks
-
That's really really helpful thanks.
-
I'm not going to lie, the /jobs/surrey/dorking page made me giggle.
You know, it might not be the links you gained, but the links you lost. Somewhere between February and July, it appears the site lost an RSS feed link from The Guardian. Which would probably account for the /blog problem. There was also a pretty good .edu link that disappeared.
With a smaller portfolio of links, if you lose a couple of good links - you'll feel it. It also looks like there may have been a little 'guest blogging' going on. It's not uncommon for the host blog to take the content and pull the link when you're not looking. Who knows, maybe they did the site a favor?
I've been reasonably assured that the UK and US versions are comparable, and Panda updated a couple of times in May. So, the more likely culprit may be the user profiles on the site. It might be a good idea to cull anything that hasn't been used in a while.
I could see where the site might look thin in places. Perhaps you could partner with some kind of video transcription service? That seems like a logical step.
-
I figured I would add a general link suggestion before I respond.
- Before you do anything, measure twice cut once.
- Plug your domain into the Open Site Explorer and see if you can find the same links that GWMT is showing.
- Head over to Majestic and verify ownership of your website and make sure you can find these links.
After those are done, if the links are indeed there, start asking yourself these questions:
- Does the potential referral benefit your website at all?
- Is the content pertinent to your website?
- Does the website make YOU uncomfortable? (My personal theory is that if it makes you uncomfortable it's going to make Google uncomfortable. That doesn't include ethics/morals etc, I am strictly referring to the website itself.)
- Check the link itself and find which page on the other website its coming from. Are the links in various comments, pictures, some block text? How are the links themselves being displayed?
At the end of the day, it's going to be your decision of how to proceed with this. After looking a bit more thoroughly and after my 2nd cup of coffee I agree with Travis wholeheartedly. With the general trend of Panda, I personally assume it's just a matter of time before those links are worthless if they aren't already. Who knows what these guys are up to, it looks to me like a project that started well and was sorta taken over by the sea of the internet!
Hope this helps!
-
Thanks, checked GWMT and all links are linking to my home page.
-
Sure thanks for looking into: www.videorecruit.com
The site was performing well organically but nose dived on May 20th and I'm struggling to get it back up.
It's the blog that was hit hardest: www.videorecruit.com/blog
-
I looked at the site. It appears to be primarily 'curated content' with citations. But this be physics. You can't hit the wall without the wall hitting back.
There are quite a few ads as well. cough scraper cough
Though I agree he should definitely wait a moment before disavowing. It's just that the site does appear to be pretty low quality. It does seem like Panda bait. But apparently content gets curated/scraped all the time.
So it really depends upon the target site.
-
Simon,
I just wanted to jump in really quick and add my 2 cents. First off, being that this is the internet a lot of times you are going to get links from sources that you don't know, or didn't ask for. In fact, it actually violates Googles TOS to write content and send it to someone for the sole purpose of getting links. In a perfect world Google world, you would be writing content/making a website for yourself/Business, and yourself/business only. You would become an expert in your field that would attract customers, referrals, etc on its on and your website would grow from there. You would gain all of these links organically. Of course that doesn't always happen, and that's why we advertise etc.
As to your original question; are these links "hurting you". This is much more in depth question that will be hard to evaluate on a forum. I say that simply because I have run into a similar problem asking questions like this on forums. Of course everybody want's to help, and motives are good, but when you start talking about removing "500+" links from a website, the potential impact is rather large, the impact could be quite small as well.
In GWMT you can see which pages are being linked by the various websites. Go to the websites and try and find how your website is actually being linked Is it in the comments? Is it in articles? Does it look like spam? Do some research on the website in question, see if it has good stats.
The backlink profile doesn't look terrible, at first glance. There appear to be some solid websites linking to it. I would have to see how that specific website links to your website.
All I'm saying, before you take any direct advice from any of us on a forum, make sure you feel confident in what it is that you are going to do. It never hurts to get a second opinion and consult with someone else who can look deeply into your backlink profile!
Hope that helps a little.
-
I would be happy to lend an opinion. Would you supply the name of the domain(s) you own?
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
-
How can I avoid too many internal links in my site navigation?
Hi! I always get this notification on my pages 'Avoid Too Many Internal Links' when I run the Page Optimization Score. And this is the message I get how to fix it: Scale down the number of internal links on your page to fewer than 100, if possible. At a minimum, try to keep navigation and menu links to fewer than 100. On my website I got a desktop navigation menu and a mobile variant, so in the source this will show more internal links. If I hide those links with CSS for the view, is the problem then solved? So Does Google then see less internal links? Or does Google crawl everything? I'm curious how I can fix this double internal links issue with my navigation menu.
Technical SEO | | Tomvl
What are you guys ideas / experiences about this?0 -
Site address change: new site isn't showing up in Google, old site is gone.
We just transitioned mccacompanies.com to confluentstrategies.com. The problem is that when I search for the old name, the old website doesn't come up anymore to redirect people to the new site. On the local card, Google has even taken off the website altogether. (I'm currently still trying to gain access to manage the business listing) When I search for confluent strategies, the website doesn't come up at all. But if I use the site: operator, it is in the index. Basically, my client has effectively disappeared off the face of the Google. (In doing other name changes, this has never happened to me before) What can I do?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Should i Disavow links from Secret Search Engine Labs
Hi, I'm doing a link audit. My sites' keyword rankings and organic traffic have been sent to the Phantom Zone since the last Penguin Update. I've got 70+ and counting follow backlinks to my main domain and one of the my subdomains from http://www.secretsearchenginelabs.com/; should i disavow them? There's a load of links to many recognisable sites in there and my instinct's all out of whack with this decision. I think that these links were all manually added by a link building company on our behalf. It does look manipulated to me but i'd like a second opinion before I dump all of those links. Thanks Thanks
Technical SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Has anyone tested or knows whether it makes a difference to upload a disavow file to both www. and non-www. versions of your site in GWMT?
Although Google treats both as separate sites, I always assumed that uploading the disavow file to the canonical version of your site would solve the problem. Is this the case, or has anyone seen better results uploading to both versions?
Technical SEO | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
"One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link" Is this true?
I read this to day http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 I thought to myself, yep, thats what I been reading in Moz for years ( pitty Matt could not confirm that still the case for 2014) But reading though the comments Michael Martinez of http://www.seo-theory.com/ pointed out that Mat says "...the last time I checked, was 2009, and back then -- uh, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page."
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
Which would imply that is does not not mean it always the first link. Michael goes on to say "Back in 2008 when Rand WRONGLY claimed that Google was only counting the first link (I shared results of a test where it passed anchor text from TWO links on the same page)" then goes on to say " In practice the search engine sometimes skipped over links and took anchor text from a second or third link down the page." For me this is significant. I know people that have had "SEO experts" recommend that they should have a blog attached to there e-commence site and post blog posts (with no real interest for readers) with anchor text links to you landing pages. I thought that posting blog post just for anchor text link was a waste of time if you are already linking to the landing page with in a main navigation as google would see that link first. But if Michael is correct then these type of blog posts anchor text link blog posts would have value But who is' right Rand or Michael?0 -
Why does my site have a PageRank of 0?
My site (www.onemedical.com) has a PageRank of 0, and I can't figure out why. We did a major site update about a year ago, and moved the site from .md to .com about 9 months ago. We are crawled by Google and rank on the first page for many of our top keywords. We have a MozRank of 4.59. I figured this is something that would just take time to work out of the system, but nothing seems to change while we patiently wait. One more thing to note - when a user comes to the homepage (city selector) and selects their region they will then be cookied and directed to their relevant city site on subsequent visits. But even our city-specific pages (ie www.onemedical.com/sf) have pageranks of 0. My management team keeps asking me about this and I suspect there is something silly that we keep overlooking...but for the life of me, can't figure it out. Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | OneMedical0 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200