Advise / Help on Bad Link Removals
-
Hey everyone.
Im new to the community and new to backlinks - hence the question to the community today.
I would like help understanding options and work load around back links and removing them.
I have a client with over 8000 back links as a few years ago he paid someone about £10 to boost his rankings by adding thousands of backlinks.
We fear this is having a bad effect on their site and rankings organically as 90% of these back links have a spam score of over 50% and also no follows.My questions to the community (if you could be so kind to share) are:
1. Whats the best way to decide if a Backlink is worth keeping or removing
2. Is there a tool to decide this or assist with this somewhere on the internet?Ive had advise stating if its not hurting the page we should keep it. However, again...
How do I know what damage each Backlink is causing to the domain?I appriciate anyones time to offer some advice to a novice looking to clear these
-
Thank you for the kind response. Always a pleasure helping other marketers and business owners.
As you disavow backlinks, google (or any other search engine where you disavow them) will not calculate the links when ranking your sites, but they will still be present where posted and will show up when researched on sites like Moz, SemRush, Ahrefs, etc.
The backlinks are not removed from Moz because the list of the disavowed links are stored on the database of the search engine to be used by them. For future disavowing you can check the newly-added links or filter the full site backlinks list with the disavowed links list.
You can find the disavow links tool in the search console/webmaster tools of the 2 main search engines: Google and Bing.
If you need help with the disavow process for your site, feel free to let us know.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com -
Firstly, Thank you for such an insightful breakdown of how you would manage back links. Very useful.
I had heard that If we disavow a backlink that the backlink would still show in MOZ?
Is that true? I only know of Google Disavow, is there another way, platform or program you would advise to use? and how do I get it so that once Disavowed, the backlink no longer shows on our results? -
The quality of a backlink is based on several factors, with the main being:
- Domain Authority
- Page Authority
- Spam Score
- Relevancy
For the first 3 measurements you can get an estimate through the Moz Backlink Checker and it will help you filter damaging domains. Firstly you will need to focus more on the Spam Score, which is based on several factors calculated by Moz. Low Domain Authority and Page Authority aren't on itself a reason to disavow a backlink, but along with a high spam score or is posted on a page with irrelevant content then it can do more harm than good. My personal choice is disavowing most of the backlinks with a spam score of 50-70% and higher, and most of the backlinks with a low DA/PA and a spam score of over 20%.
Relevancy is the most difficult to maintain because it requires you to manually inspect every link and check their content. If your website is regarding construction and you have built backlinks on a gucci bags vendor it will do nothing to improve your rankings, or even harm them.
The geo-location of the site where the backlink is posted is very important for some businesses as well, given that they operate within a certain region. If you're operating within the US there would be no point in having backlinks in Italian or Chinese sites, and ranking on those regions, and from my experience it tends to lower rankings in the origin country. Backlinks on sites without a specific geo-location are fine though.
When selecting which backlinks to disavow you will need to be very careful not to disavow backlinks that are useful to your site and all the above factors need to be taken into consideration altogether.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com
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
-
Inbound Linking
Hello, I manage a company that owns a bunch of schools (20) websites. They would like to create on each website a page which shows their schools in all the locations. Will this be ok as far as white hat practices and inbound linking?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel0 -
Link Getting Deleted for Few Days
If a link gets deleted for few days and re-appears... Will Google treat it as a "new link" or give it the same old link-age.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Akshayshr0 -
What is really a bad link in 2017?
Hi, Routine answer is: A link which doesn't provides any value. Tired of listening to this statement where we can see number of back-links been generated with different scenarios. There are still many low DA websites which speaks exactly about a brand and link a brand naturally. So, is this a bad link or good link? Let's be honest here. No one gonna visit such pages and browse through our website; it's all about what it's been doing in-terms of SEO. Do these websites to be in disavow list? Beside the context how a brand been mentioned, what are the other metrics to disavow a domain? Expecting some real answers for this straight question. If it's a low DA site and speaking about exactly our website- Good or bad? Vice-versa...high DA website mentioned website with less matching content. What is the proportion of website authority and content context? Can we keep a medium DA backlinks with some Moz spam score?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Submitting url to link directories seen as un-natural link building?
Hi I have been a lurker for a long time, so I finally took the step to make my 1st post, and will hopefully start giving back more in the future since I have gained invaluable info from this great site Background I hired a new freelancer on our team of SEO consultants ("specialists") During the course a month he (the new consultant) submitted our website to numerous link directories (he assured me this is good), today I received the report of the work he had been doing for the past 4-weeks. I opened the report and I was furious and wanted to sack him there and then The Problem / My Question He had submitted our website to 150 directories with various levels of page rank, ranging from 7-1. Most of the directories are totally irrelevant to our niche (we are in the catering business) and he had gone and submitted the site to directories such as "finance busters", "questfinder" etc For all 150 submissions he used: exactly the same url exactly the same title exactly the same description exactly the same keywords My Concern Am I right to be worried about this? Or am I completely wrong and may this actually have an effect (even if none)? The way I see it is that Google is seeing 150 duplicate links coming from irrelevant directories all within a months time, which will trigger a red flag and possibly do major damage to my site, which has always been strictly white hat and been doing pretty well. p.s does link directory submissions even count these days anyway? Thanks for reading and advice very much welcome
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | timthetanker0 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Is there a paid link hierarchy?
It seems like the more I learn about my competition's links, the less I understand about the penalties associated with paid links. Martindale-hubbard (in my industry) basically sells links to every lawyer out there, but none of the websites with those links are penalized. I'm sure you all have services like that in your various industries. Granted, Martindale-hubbard is involved in the legal community and it's tied to Lexis Nexis, but any small amount of research would tell you that paid links are a part of their service. Why does this company (and companies that use them) not get penalized? Did the penguin update just go after companies that got links from really seedy, foreign companies with gambling/porn/medication link profiles? I keep reading on this forum and other places that paid links are bad, but it looks to me like there are fundamental differences in the penalties for paid links purchased from one company vs another. Is that the case or am I missing something? Thanks, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How do you remove unwanted links, built by your previous SEO company?
We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clairerichards0 -
Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus1111