Partial manual action - unnatural links from domain takeover
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One of our clients took over a competitor and it would appear that all links to that take over website got redirected to our client. This resulted in ~430,000 links to our client in a short time period. This also resulted in a partial manual action against the unnatural links. What would Google be looking for us to solve in this case? Should we change all of the links to "no follow", should we remove them completey?
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If you got a partial action warning when you redirected site A to site B, then there are a couple of possible reasons why:
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If Site A has a lot of unnatural links pointing to it then those suddenly are pointing at Site B.
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It's also possible that the unnatural links pointing to Site A were part of the problem but that it uncovered a problem with unnatural links to Site A.
If you know that Site A has had no manipulative link building done, then a quick solution would be to remove the redirect from Site B to Site A and file for reconsideration. However, if Site A has unnatural links as well then Google won't remove the warning unless you clean up those links as well.
If removing the redirect is not an option then there are a few things you can do:
-Do a link audit of all of the links pointing to Site A AND site b, attempt to manually remove as many links as you can, document your efforts, disavow the remaining unnatural links and then apply for reconsideration. The process of filing for reconsideration is extensive.
-There are also ways that you can redirect Site A to Site B and NOT pass any of the link equity. You can do so by redirecting via an intermediate page that is blocked by robots.txt. This is a complicated thing to do, but it can be done. This would remove the link equity from ALL links that pointed to Site B so that they don't pass to Site A. This includes removing the link equity from any good links that were there.
However, my guess is that if you got a warning for Site A that Site A may also have unnatural links, so you may have quite a job on your hands in cleaning this up.
With all of that being said, there is some debate as to whether you need to heed partial match warnings. In some cases Google says you can ignore the warning because Google is simply not counting the unnatural links. But, in every case that I have examined where a site got this warning, within a few weeks their rankings started to drop. In my opinion, these warnings should always be cleared.
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