Backlinks from a secondary domain

[ACEmina]

Hi

i finally figured out why my link profile is out of wack. Apparently we had a second domain registered that for some reason was active and linking to us - somewhat duplicated site. no idea when or how that happened. I wasnt with the company then.

anyhow Ive now pointed the domain to a blank folder since I dont know how to disable it in 1&1 Hosting (if anyone knows please let me know!). Im wondering if this is enough? will the links still be there indexed even though the domain points to a blank folder? also how can I get google to profile my backlinks again? so I can see if it worked. Currently waiting for a new Moz crawl so Ill see if at least there my profile is looking healthier.

thanks in advance!

[ACEmina]

Hi Gaston,

thanks for the response. Didn't even think of disavow! Great reminder. Fingers crossed it registers soon. Id like my stats to be a bit more reliable.

[GastonRiera]

Hello ACEmina,

Yeap, it will work, dont expect a 5 to 1 increase in positions, but definitely will help. Wait some time, a few weeks to analyze the impact.
Remember that google does crawl the whole web every time. If you want to speed things a little, you could disavow the links coming from that domain. Here some resources:
Disavow tool - Google Search Console
Disavow backlinks - Google Search Console Help
Your Start-to-Finish Guide to Using Google's Disavow Tool - Moz Blog

Also, keep in mind that what backlinks tools, like Moz, ahrefs or any other, report doesnt exactly reflect what googles sees. My advise is to handle with care those reports. It could happen that some tools still sees those backlink, google already ignored them and you keep making changes to avoid them.
And Google is somehow diabolic with us not showing the whole buch of backlinks discovered in Search Console.

Hope I've helped.
Best luck.
GR.