How do I get rid of irrelevant back links pointing to missing pages on my site
-
Hi all,
My site was hacked about a year ago and as a result I now have a ton of back links from irrelevant sites pointing to pages on my site that no longer exist. The followed back links section on the Competitive domain analysis tool shows about 3 pages worth of these horrible links.
I have 2 questions: how bad is this for my site's SEO (which isn't good anyway, Page Rank 0) and how do I get rid of them?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Andy
-
Hi getzen,
The primary problem here is that these links are resulting in 404's which can hurt your site.
If they are just not terribly relevant, but may produce traffic that is useful to you, then you can create a nice "Oops!" page to give visitors options to go to other pages on your site (we call this our "Bounce Page"). This is preferable to a "catch-all" redirect to your home page when you know that the likelihood of a high bounce rate is a concern, since Bounce is now known to be a ranking factor for major Search Engines.
If you are clever with the design of this page you can create ways to keep these non-relevant visitors on the page (rotating banners with funny or clever images, or maybe a video embed could be used).
The primary goal is to eliminate the 404 Errors, but to also be mindful of the impact of Bounce.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I just asked a similar question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-do-you-deal-with-spammy-backlinks and it will give you a few more perspectives but mostly everyone says not to worry about it.
-
Incoming links, in general, can't hurt you. I wouldn't worry about it, especially if they're pointed to dead pages (i.e. 404) on your site.
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
When rogerbot tried to crawl my site it gets a 404\. Why?
When rogerbot tries to craw my site it tries http://website.com. My website then tries to redirect to http://www.website.com and is throwing a 404 and ends up not getting crawled. It also throws a 404 when trying to read my robots.txt file for some reason. We allow rogerbot user agent so unsure whats happening here. Is there something weird going on when trying to access my site without the 'www' that is causing the 404? Any insight is helpful here. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | BlakeBooth0 -
Find all old links from a site to 301
We worked on this site a while ago - http://www.electric-heatingsupplies.co.uk/ Whilst we did a big 301 redirect exercise, I wanted to check that we "got" all of them. Is there a historical way I can check all the old indexed links to make sure they correlate to the new links? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
How to get rid of duplicate content
I have duplicate content that looks like http://deceptionbytes.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=932fea0640143bf08fe157d3570792a56dcc1284 - however I have 50 of these all with different numbers on the end. Does this affect the search engine optimization and how can I disallow this in my robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | Mishelm1 -
What happens when a link goes to a dead url on my site?
I noticed in Open Site Explorer, I have several incoming links going to dead urls because i re-organized my site. For example, there might be an incoming link to: sample.php?ID=8 The problem is that I moved the file to /subdir1 so it would be nice if it could link to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 BUT, on top of that, I have also changed the url to seo-friendly urls. So, really, it should link to /Category_Descripton/ProductName/8 and then get re-written to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 So, what are the implications of having these incoming links to dead urls other than the bad user experience. What are the implications from an SEO standpoint? What's the best way to fix this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | webtarget0 -
How To Find and Delete Erroneous Pages From My Wordpress Site
I've downloaded the Seomoz csv file from the crawl data on my site and it found lots of 404 errors, duplicate content, etc. The problem is that when i go to my wp-admin and look for the pages to delete them, I dont see them. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've checked with HostGator and they say it's a WP problem. I need help locating where they are so i can clean them up or delete them. Thanks Mike
Technical SEO | | mikemunter0 -
Should you worry about adding geo-targeted pages to your site?
Post-Panda, should I worry about adding a bunch of geo-targeted landing pages at once? It's a community, people have added their location on their profile pages. I'm worried if we decide to make all the locations into hyperlinks that point to new geo-targeted pages, it could get us extra traffic for those geo-specific keyword phrases but penalize the site as a whole for having so many low-quality pages. What I'm thinking is maybe to start small and turn, say, United States into a hyperlink that points to a page (that would house our community members that reside in the United States) and add extra unique content to the page. And only add a new location page when we know we'll be adding unique content to it, so it's not basically just page sorting. Thoughts? Hope that makes sense. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1