Irrelevant backlinks - will 301 redirect cleanse the relationship?
-
My client has thousands of clients for whom they provided websites that used to reside in a subdirectory of their own domain. They moved them to their own domains but there are tens of thousands of backlinks on those sites pointing back to the original domain. Those backlinks are completely irrelevant and are probably hurting them by sending the wrong signals to Google on what this site really is about.
My question is will the 301 redirect be enough to cleanse the relationship between my client and all their clients' sites or should I ask the client to clean up all those backlinks on their clients' sites and remove their domain from the target urls? That's a huge job, obviously.
-
Thanks everyone. Since 301 redirects are out of the question, what I've done is found all the directories that really shouldn't be on this site at all and noindexed them. None of those pages are good for rank for anything so it doesn't matter. The client is instructing their 'customers' to get their sites off the doubleknot site and onto their own domains. Once those are moved over there will still be lots of links pointing to doubleknot and fixing them will be a nightmare because there are just too many, but I'm going to see if they can do a sitewide edit and add rel="nofollow" to each link pointing to doubleknot's irrelevent directories and also see if we can do a mass search and replace to point the links to the right domain when necessary. If there is not a pattern, that will no be possible and someone will have to do it by hand. With noindex and nofollow working for us, that might be enough
My client is a team of IT and computer science experts, and they've been advised of the problem. They're looking into ways to put their degrees to work to clean the data.
@Richard, to answer your question, their rank is terrible. That's why they called me. Their website is also not at all optimized so I'm restructuring the architecture and asking them to provide new copy. Then I'll do the standard on-site optimization. It could be that might be enough to turn things around. And then it's linkbuilding time. Time will tell. Thanks again!
-
What are your clients rankings like? If they're no good, then all of the above answers are great.
But if your clients rankings are good, I wouldn't touch it. I have a client in a similar situation who has hundreds of bad inbound links from the same site. But .. he continues to rank in position 2 for the most sought after and highly lucrative keyword in his industry. I could fix it with one line in a disavow file using a site wide domain disavow command, but I dare not touch it as long as he ranks. He's been ranking there now for close to two years! In situations like this Seo theory goes out the window. In short, if he's ranking then I wouldn't touch those links as the algo's still nowhere near perfect.
-
Cleaning up the backlinks is by far the best option, and regardless of what else you do I recommend setting that in motion - but it sounds like a 100% success rate is pretty unlikely (and it usually is).
If you don't need any pages in the problem directories to be indexed, I'd definitely consider noindexing the /event/ directory and any other directories that are causing problems. You may also want to disavow the old backlinks on a domain level, which will take less time than doing it on a link-by-link basis. If you are going to do this, be warned that it has the potential to hurt your rankings - these links may be causing a penalty risk now, but they may also be passing value to your domain that, once removed, will cause the domain to slip. If you do decide to go that route, I recommend coupling it with a concerted link building effort - have a plan for several months of link-worthy content and a solid promotion plan to get new, more-relevant links to the domain.
-
I just found out my client can NOT use 301 redirects, something to do with the way their software is setup. I don't get it, but let's assume that is true.
If you do a Google query on site:www.doubleknot.com/event you'll find 64K pages, most of which are no longer in the doubleknot site and have been migrated over to the scout's own url. For example www.doubleknot.com/event/1638783 is in google's index but when you click on it, it goes to http://www.narragansettbsa.org/event/1638783. It is not using a 301 redirect to do that.
Many of those transferred scout pages retain backlinks pointing to the original page on the doubleknot.com website. So not only are those backlinks irrelevant, they would be broken except for the fact they are being redirected.
I gave them the task of cleaning those up, but now here's another question since a 301 redirect doesn't seem to be an option. I have no idea why those doubleknot.com/event pages are still in the index. Must have something to do with the fact they can't use 301s. So let's assume they need to stay. I'm considering asking him to noindex the /event/ directory and a few others that have the same problem. Is this a smart move? I'm thinking it will clear out ten of thousands of girl scout and boy scout pages that might be clouding the waters here. If we do that though, we're still left with thousands of boy scout backlinks pointing to old pages on their root domain unless they somehow manage to clean those all up too.
Thoughts?
-
Hi there
301 redirects will pass link equity - good, bad, or otherwise - roughly around 90-99% of link equity.
If you are seeing irrelevant backlinks in your client's profile, I would suggest going through a proper backlink audit and researching which links you'd like to remove, update, and disavow.
Link equity can be passed from domain to domain, so this is something you are going to look into, especially if there are redirects involved.
Taking the time now will help you in the long run and save you some headaches. Hope this helps - good luck!
-
No, a 301 does not break the links - it will eventually pass most of the bad as well as most of the good.
I think you already know the answer to your question but you want someone to say it so I will. The best answer would be to clean it up properly. The second best answer would be to reinstate the previous subdomain folders and then noindex all of them. You could also do a 301 on all of them to a page you don't want to pass value to, such as yoursite.com/passjuicehere and then just noindex that page. If 301s are your fastest way, at least that doesn't pass it anywhere of value.
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
-
Do I want backlinks from companies my site has a business relationship with
I automatically think yes... but nofollow links will be safer - that would be my choice as I always err on the side of caution... If I reached out to the entire network with quality content, as I would through a PR campaign, I am wondering whether the pre-existing business relationship would mean the link wouldn't be seen as truly independent by Google. Your thoughts would be welcome, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
301 entire site
Is there a good 301 code snippet to change just the root domain but keep the ending extensions? I just bid on a domain that I think would be much better for me moving forward, but do not want to have to try going through thousands of pages to do their 301 individually My site is almost 4 yrs old. Well established and has a large fanbase. Several of our social networks are under the name of the new branded domain, hence part of the desire to switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
301 redirections done too late - What do you suggest?
Hi, When pushing our new site live, most of the 301 redirections got done too late for several reasons. Understandably, our site rankings in google have taken a hit now. So far we have just tried to perfectly optimize the pages that used to rank well (They weren't even optimized before and were still ranking) , to get our positions back. But does anyone have an idea about what else we could do? Is there a recommended "action plan" when someone is late with their 301 redirections?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
301 redirect subdomain to path and 301 for popular pages
We have very popular pages that have many backlinks. www.chezmaya.com/jeux/game33.htm have so many backlinks and it's very popular. Now If i'm moving this page to a new path like : http://www.chezmaya.com/jeux/component/mtree/Défouloir/Game33/details.html with a 301. Your SEOmoz toolbar is now giving a very low PA:1 and mR:0.00 for this new page. My question is after you crawl my site again would you change the values to what /jeux/game33.htm got before ? We used to have jeux.chezmaya.com and moved to www.chezmaya.com/jeux/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SocialGeekMedia
Same here PA:1 and mR:0.00 for this page. Also Matt Cutts say that Google does transfer the juice from the old page to the new one. I already saw one url changed in a search for puzzle, it's at the same position it was before, but it say's 6 days ago beside. So I wonder if this is temporary and it will move with time? Thanks0 -
Embed Same Video On Multiple Pages or 301 Redirect Into 1?
I have 3 pages that rank VERY well for related terms such as: -How to get widgets -How to become a widget -Getting widgets -etc. I am incorporating a video on the topic and rewriting much of the content on the site. I am wondering if it is wise to 301 redirect all 3 pages to 1 page that has the new/better video content or if I should leave the old content that is ranking well and embed the video on the top of each. The anal retentive side of me wants a nice new site structure and 1 powerful page. However, if the 3 pages are currently ranking (sometimes 2 pages in the same top 10 results), should I mess with what is working? Ultimately my goal is to increase the avg time on site as these 3 pages are top traffic pages for the site. However, they do not convert at all, as they are for a product we don't offer. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
301 of EDM domains
If I buy a keyword EDM domain and 301 redirect it to my site, will I rank better for that keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creaturmedia0 -
How to stop Google crawling after 301 redirect?
I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
301 redirect for ip address in SERPs
Hi, I've recently had the misfortune of my site's ip address being crawled and indexed by Google, which is causing some duplicate content issues. Due to the nature of the site we're not able to implement a canonical tag to fix this at present. Would a 301 redirect do the trick, and if so, could someone point me to what I'd need to add to our .htaccess file? Many thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0