Inbound Links - Redirect, Leave Alone, etc
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Hi,
I recently download the inbound links report for my client to look for some opportunities. When they switched to our platform a couple years ago, the format of some of their webpages change, so a number of these inbound links are going to an error page and should be redirected.
However, some of these are spammy. In that case, someone recommended to me to disavow them but still redirect anyway.
In other cases, some were "last seen" a year or two ago, so when I try to go to the URL the link is coming from, I also get an error page.
Should I bother to redirect in these cases? Should I disavow in both cases? Or leave them alone? Thanks for any input!
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Thank you for your input. Some of these are nofollow, those I guess if we are going to disavow them, there is no point?
I was going to disavow some of the links but Google repeatedly gave a warning that you shouldn't do it unless you think it's a "considerable amount" or you're sure you're being penalized. Does anyone have thoughts on that?
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If you want to disavow and redirect at the same time, you probably wouldn't want to use a 301 which passes SEO authority (and negative equity) along to the resultant page. I'd probably use a 302 or a 307, and then disavow the linking domain (or page) in Google's disavow tool which is here. I might also try to no-index the redirecting URL, though with a redirect in place this could not be done within the HTML / source code. You'd have to deploy the no-index directive via the HTTP header instead, using X-Robots
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I would redirect any links (spammy or not) that are to pages that are indexed. If they are no longer indexed (since the platform change), I'm not sure I would bother.
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