Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
-
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist.
There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file?
Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not?
Hope Im making sense
-
Sounds a plan. Thanks for your help bud, much appreciated.
-
My take, I'll just go ahead and start doing other things to improve it's current rankings. I could assign someone to go over links if another team member is available.
If I see improvements, within the next month, then that's a good sign already that you should continue and not worry about the dead links.
It takes google a long time to actually forget about those links pointing to your site. So if they are dead AND then you didnt notice any increases or drops in analytics, then they are pretty much ineffective so they shouldnt be a major obstacle. I think someone coined a term for it, ghost links or something. LOL.
-
Hi. I did go through GA several years back, think back to 2011, but didn't really see dramatic changes in traffic other than a general trend of just low organic traffic throughout. Keep in mind that it's an engineering site, so no thousands of visit per day... the keywords that are important for the site get below 1000 searcher per month (data from the days when Google Keyword Tool shared this info with us mortals).
That said, I do notice in roughly 60% of the links absolutely no regard for anchors, so some are www.domain.com/index.php, Company Name, some are Visit Site, some are Website etc. Some anchors are entire generic sentences like "your company provided great service, your entire team should be commended blah blah blah". And there are tons of backlinks from http://jennifers.tempdomainname.com...a domain that a weird animal as there's not much data on who they are, what they do and what the deal is with the domain name itself. Weird.
In all honesty, nothing in WMT or GA suggests that the site got hit by either Penguin or Panda....BUT, having a ton of links that originate from non-existing pages, pages with no thematic proximity to the client site, anchors that are as generic as "Great Service"...is it a plus to err on the side of caution and get them disavowed, or wait for a reason from Google and then do the link hygiene?
-
Hi Igor,
Seeing ezinearticles in there is definitely a red flag that tells you that it probably has web directories, article networks, blog networks, pliggs, guestbooks and other links from that time.
Maybe you can dig up some old analytics data, check out when the traffic dropped.
If you did not see any heavy anchor text usage, then the site must've gotten away with a sitewide penalty, I would assume it's just a few (or many, but not all) of the keywords that got hit so either way, youll need to clean up -> disavow the links if they are indeed like that. So that's probably a reason for it's low organic rankings.
That, and since it's old, it might have been affected by panda too.
-
Thanks for your response. Im about done with cleaning up the link list in very broad strokes, eliminating obvious poor quality links, so in a few hours I could have a big list for disavowing.
The site is very specific, mechanical engineering thing and they sell technology and consulting to GM, GE, Intel, Nasa... so backlinks from sites for rental properties and resorts do look shady....even if they do return a 200 status.
But...how vigilent is google now with all the Penguin updates about backlinks from non-related sites, and my client's site has tons of them? And if Majestic reports them to have zero trust flow, is there a benefit of having them at all?
Thanks.
-
Hi. Thanks for responding. WMT shows just a fraction of the links actually. about few thousand for the site that Majestic Historic reports 48k. But I dont have any notifications of issues. Im guessing that with all the Penguin updates most sites won't get any notifications and it's up to us SEO guys to figure out why rankings are so low.
About quality of the links, many do come from weird sites, and I've noticed ezinearticles too. Problem is that the 48k portfolio was built by non-seo experts and now, few years after the fact, Im stuck with a site that doesn't rank well and has no notifications in WMT. But can I take the lack of notification as evidence that the site has no backlinks problem, or do I read-in the problem in poor organic ranking?
-
If I would be in that similar situation I would not really care about it but if it didn’t took too much of my time, I would have included all of these in the disavow file too.
But if the page is not giving a 200 status, this shouldn’t really be a problem.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Igor,
Do they still show up in Webmaster tools? Do you have a penalty because of those links that used to link to the site? If not then I wouldn't really worry about it and just prioritize other things and make that a side task.
Are the majority of them on bad looking domains? If you checked the link URL on archive.org, were they spammy links? Then go ahead and include them in the disavow list.
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
-
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Technical SEO | | h.hedayati6712365410 -
Received A Notice Regarding Spammy Structured Data. But we don't have any structured data or do we?
Got a message that we have spammy structured data on our site via webmaster tools and have no idea what they are referring to. We do not use any structured data using schema.org mark up. Could they be referring to something else? The message was: To: Webmaster of <a>http://www.lulus.com/</a>, Google has detected structured markup on some of your pages that violates our structured data quality guidelines. In order to ensure quality search results for users, we display rich search results only for content that uses markup that conforms to our quality guidelines. This manual action has been applied to lulus.com/ . We suggest that you fix your markup and file a reconsideration request. Once we determine that the markup on the pages is compliant with our guidelines, we will remove this manual action. What could we be showing them that would be interpreted as structured data, and or spammy structured data?
Technical SEO | | KentH0 -
Why isn't our new site being indexed?
We built a new website for a client recently. Site: https://www.woofadvisor.com/ It's been live for three weeks. Robots.txt isn't blocking Googlebot or anything. Submitted a sitemap.xml through Webmasters but we still aren't being indexed. Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | RobbieD910 -
We can't figure out why competitors have better position(s) in Google
We are using MOZ analytics for some days now, and it really helps us with important information about our rankings.
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
I hope you guys can help us out with the following particular case; In google.nl (dutch) we rank position #18 with the following searchterm 'sphinx 345' one of our competitors rank position #3.
We used the MOZ On Page Grade tool to find out some details about the two pages:
Our page #18: http://goo.gl/cTsbmI
Competitor page #3: http://goo.gl/qk21sM Our page hits an A and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 52
The competitors page hits an A too and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 45 About the link structure; for our page there is no link data found in Open Site Explorer. The url exists about a year and a half now.
I'm also very sure we have many internal links to this url.
Does Google and other crawlers have a hard time to crawl our site?(it's a Magento site, our competitors do have custom-made e-commerce systems, maybe that has something to do with it?) As i were saying;we can't figure this out. I hope you guys can help to get us any further. Regards, Wilco0 -
Should I just have links on my home page or intro to articles
Hi, i am having problems optimizing my home page for the words, lifestyle magazine, online magazine and lifestyle news. my site is here www.in2town.co.uk I am just wondering if i have to much content on the page for google to understand that it is a lifestyle magazine. I am wondering if i should just have the links on the page and no introduction to the articles which i have seen here with a site http://www.femalefirst.co.uk and i am wondering how sites like this are ranking better than ours when they have hardly any content on their home page http://www.nelifestyle.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
http://www.lifestyle.org/
http://www.internationallifestylemagazine.com/ any advice would be most welcome0 -
Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow". Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator. Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be... Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
What's the best way to deal with an entire existing site moving from http to https?
I have a client that just switched their entire site from the standard unsecure (http) to secure (https) because of over-zealous compliance issues for protecting personal information in the health care realm. They currently have the server setup to 302 redirect from the http version of a URL to the https version. My first inclination was to have them simply update that to a 301 and be done with it, but I'd prefer not to have to 301 every URL on the site. I know that putting a rel="canonical" tag on every page that refers to the http version of the URL is a best practice (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394), but should I leave the 302 redirects or update them to 301's. Something seems off to me about the search engines visiting an http page, getting 301 redirected to an https page and then being told by the canonical tag that it's actually the URL they were just 301 redirected from.
Technical SEO | | JasonCooper0 -
How do I use the Robots.txt "disallow" command properly for folders I don't want indexed?
Today's sitemap webinar made me think about the disallow feature, seems opposite of sitemaps, but it also seems both are kind of ignored in varying ways by the engines. I don't need help semantically, I got that part. I just can't seem to find a contemporary answer about what should be blocked using the robots.txt file. For example, I have folders containing site comps for clients that I really don't want showing up in the SERPS. Is it better to not have these folders on the domain at all? There are also security issues I've heard of that make sense, simply look at a site's robots file to see what they are hiding. It makes it easier to hunt for files when they know the directory the files are contained in. Do I concern myself with this? Another example is a folder I have for my xml sitemap generator. I imagine google isn't going to try to index this or count it as content, so do I need to add folders like this to the disallow list?
Technical SEO | | SpringMountain0