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
-
My site Metrics are not as per they should
Hi, I am regularly making links on my site to improve its metrics but i am confused how other people fastly improve their DA/PA and my DA/PA is not improving with that site. The same happened with spam score. It has been a month i disavow my links having spam score but instead of decrease in it, my spam score increased. Please advice. Is there any special way to use that help moz crawler to check site and update accordingly? Please help
Technical SEO | | AzadSeo37310 -
Links from a nonexistent domain, what do we do?
Our website is receiving 15 links that I believe are negatively impacting us. The problem is, this website linking to us no longer exists. The domain is not even hosted. The website linking to us is: thepurpleelephantboutique . com/ How do we fix/resolve this issue?
Technical SEO | | spadedesign0 -
My site was hacked and spammy URLs were injected that pointed out. The issue was fixed, but GWT is still reporting more of these links.
Excuse me for posting this here, I wasn't having much luck going through GWT support. We recently moved our eCommerce site to a new server and in the process the site was hacked. Spammy URLs were injected in, all of which were pointing outwards to some spammy eCommerce retail stores. I removed ~4,000 of these links, but more continue to pile in. As you can see, there are now over 20,000 of these links. Note that our server support team does not see these links anywhere. I understand that Google doesn't generally view this as a problem. But is that true given my circumstance? I cannot imagine that 20,000 new, senseless 404's can be healthy for my website. If I can't get a good response here, would anyone know of a direct Google support email or number I can use for this issue?
Technical SEO | | jampaper0 -
Mobile site content and main site content
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried. I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Our stage site got crawled and we got an unnatural inbound links warning. What now?
live site: www.mybarnwoodframes.com stage site: www.methodseo.net We recently finished a redesign of our site to improve our navigation. Our developer insisted on hosting the stage site on her own server with a separate domain while she worked on it. However, somebody left the site turned on one day and Google crawled the entire thing. Now we have 4,320 pages of 100% identical duplicate content with this other site. We were upset but didn't think that it would have any serious repercussions until we got two orders from customers from the stage site one day. Turns out that the second site was ranking pretty decently for a duplicate site with 0 links, the worst was yet to come however. During the 3 months of the redesign our rankings on our live site dropped and we suffered a 60% drop in organic search traffic. On May 22, 2013 day of the Penguin 2.0 release we received an unnatural inbound links warning. Google webmaster tools shows 4,320 of our 8,000 links coming from the stage site domain to our live site, we figure that was the cause of the warning. We finished the redesign around May 14th and we took down the stage site, but it is still showing up in the search results and the 4,320 links are still showing up in our webmaster tools. 1. Are we correct to assume that it was the stage site that caused the unnatural links warning? 2. Do you think that it was the stage site that caused the drop in traffic? After doing a link audit I can't find any large amount of horrendously bad links coming to the site. 3. Now that the stage site has been taken down, how do we get it out of Google's indexes? Will it be taken out over time or do we need to do something on our end for it to be delisted? 4. Once it's delisted the links coming from it should go away, in the meantime however, should we disavow all of the links from the stage site? Do we need to file a reconsideration request or should we just be patient and let them go away naturally? 5. Do you think that our rankings will ever recover?
Technical SEO | | gallreddy0 -
Best practices for controlling link juice with site structure
I'm trying to do my best to control the link juice from my home page to the most important category landing pages on my client's e-commerce site. I have a couple questions regarding how to NOT pass link juice to insignificant pages and how best to pass juice to my most important pages. INSIGNIFICANT PAGES: How do you tag links to not pass juice to unimportant pages. For example, my client has a "Contact" page off of there home page. Now we aren't trying to drive traffic to the contact page, so I'm worried about the link juice from the home page being passed to it. Would you tag the Contact link with a "no follow" tag, so it doesn't pass the juice, but then include it in a sitemap so it gets indexed? Are there best practices for this sort of stuff?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
See your sites Architecture
Does anybody know a problem where you can see how your internal linkings look to the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Site not indexing correctly
I am trying to figure out what is going on with my site listings. Google is only displaying my title and url - no description. You can see it when you search for Franchises for Sale. The site is www.franchisesolutions.com. Why could this happen? Also I saw a big drop off in a handful of keyword rankings today. Could this be related?
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions0