Do dead/inactive links matter?
-
In cleaning up the backlink profile for my parent's website, I've come across quite a few dead links. For instance, the links in the comments here: http://www.islanddefjam.com/artist/news_single.aspx?nid=4726&artistID=7290
Do I need to worry about these links? I assume if the links are no longer active, and hence not showing up in webmaster or moz reports, I can probably ignore them, but I'm wondering if I should try and get them removed regardless? I've read that google is increasingly taking into account references (i.e. website mentions that are not links) and I don't know if inactive spam links might leave a bad impression of a website. Am I being overly paranoid?
I imagine disavowing them would be pointless as you can't attach a nofollow tag to an inactive link.
-
Thanks. I had the feeling i was probably getting a bit carried away. I've been working so long at the link removals now, and I'm worried if I leave anything spammy we'll be stuck with this Penguin penalty forever, but I'll just ignore these links.
-
I think you might just be being slightly paranoid.
I really wouldn't worry about things like that.
There's no evidence to support that search engines currently or will ever take things like that into account. I think it would really skew the results if they did.
Just ensure that your cleaning your link profile and disavowing anything that would be considered unrelated, spammy or manipulative.
If your trying to clean things up from a brand perspective then it can sometimes be worth attempting to get rid of no-follow links that look spammy or are in bad reference etc. But to be honest, that's normally only necessary for well established brands.
Hope this answers your question.
Thanks
SilverDoor
-
If those are in comments I wouldn't care about it; if it would be in your pages I should for sure delete them.
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
-
Link Building vs. Straight Earning Links Discussion
Hello, I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content. I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry? Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach. But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome. Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing. Would love to hear your experiences either way. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW3 -
Boosting Equity-Passing Links?
Hello Moz folks, We have a SEO client who has exponentially fewer equity-passing links(inbound and internal) than their two major competitors, which I'm sure is a MAJOR factor in their rankings. In fact, the numbers are so drastically different seems to indicate that these competitors are participating in some sort of black hat link farm. For example: Internal and Inbound Equity-Passing Links Our client - 2274 Competitor 1 - 496k Competitor 2 - 143k How is this possible or legit? I don't understand. Our well-known client has been in business for 10+ years and they have a content-rich, WordPress website consisting of thousands of pages that have been optimized for search, including keyword-rich URLs, page titles, metas, H1 tags, etc. The things that keep coming to mind are the need for more links and more content. One thing that comes to mind is that the client launched a new site about 1.5 years ago and changed their domain prefix from http to https. I'm not sure if this would have an impact on inbound link equity or not. 301 redirects are in place so from what I understand, all of the old http pages should have passed at least partial domain equity to the new https site. I'm also wondering if changing the structure of WordPress categories, tags and author pages could somehow dynamically increase the page count and amount of perceived content. We may be overly restrictive with Google Search Console. Anyway, I'm at a loss and don't understand how our competitors, with seemingly similar content, could have exponentially more links and are dominating the search results. Thanks for your help and sage advice. Your input is very much appreciated. Eric pSzXl
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish0 -
Cloaking/Malicious Code
Does anybody have any experience with software for identifying this sort of thing? I was informed by a team we are working with that our website may have been compromised and I wanted to know what programs people have used to identify cloaking attempts and/or bad code. Thanks everybody!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Anybody have useful advice to fix a very bad link profile?
Hello fellow mozzers. I am interested in getting the communities opinion on how to fix an extremely bad link profile, or whether it would be easier to start over on a new domain. This is for an e-commerce site that sells wedding rings. Prior to coming to our agency, the client had been using a different service that was doing some serious black hat linkbuilding on a truly staggering scale. Of the roughly 53,000 links that show up in OSE, 16,500 of them have the anchor text "wedding rings", 1,300 "wedding ring sets", etc. For contrast, there are only two "visit website", and just one domain name anchor text. So it is about the farthest from natural you can get. Anyway, the site traffic was doing great until the end of February, when it took a massive hit and lost over half the day to day traffic volume, and steadily declined until April 24th (Penguin), when it took another huge hit and lost almost 70% of traffic from Google. Note that the traffic from Yahoo/Bing stayed the same. So the question is, is it worth trying to clean up this mess of a backlink profile or would it be smarter to start fresh with a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CustomCreatives0 -
Getting Credit for your own inbound links
Good afternoon, I have been comparing competitors with the Open Site Explorer looking at their inbound links. I have noticed that they have been getting credit for their own inbound links within their site. Is there something I am doing wrong as inbound links on my site aren't getting found? Could this have anything to do with Webmaster tools? Thanks in advance, SEO_123
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TWPLC_seo0 -
Link Building: Location-specific pages
Hi! I've technically been a member for a few years, but just recently decided to go Pro (and I gotta say, I'm glad I did!). Anyway, as I've been researching and analyzing, one thing I noticed a competitor is doing is creating location-specific pages. For example, they've created a page that has a URL similar to this: www.theirdomain.com/seattle-keyword-phrase They have a few of these for specific cities. They rank well for the city-keyword combo in most cases. Each city-specific page looks the same and the content is close to being the same except that they drop in the "seattle keyword phrase" bit here and there. I noticed that they link to these pages from their site map page, which, if I were to guess, is how SEs are getting to those pages. I've seen this done before on other sites outside my industry too. So my question is, is this good practice or is it something that should be avoided?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AngieHerrera0 -
750,000 pv/month due to webspam. What to do?
Let's say your user-generated content strategy is wildly successful, in a slightly twisted sense: webspammers fill it with online streaming sports teasers and the promise of "Weeds season 7 episode 11." As a result of hard SEO work done to build the profile of the domain, these webspam pages seem to rank well in Google, and deliver nearly 750k pageviews, and many many unique visitors, to the site every month. The ad-sales team loves the traffic boost. Overall traffic, uniques, and search numbers look rosy. What do you do? a) let it ride b) throw away roughly half your search traffic overnight by deleting all the spam and tightening the controls to prevent spammers from continuing to abuse the site There are middle-ground solutions, like using NOINDEX more liberally on UGC pages, but the end result is the same as option (b) even if it takes longer to get there.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcglynn0