Irrelevant backlinks - will 301 redirect cleanse the relationship?

[katandmouse]

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.

[katandmouse]

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!

[Dezzign]

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.

[RuthBurrReedy]

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.

[katandmouse]

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?

[PatrickDelehanty]

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!

[MattAntonino]

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.