Cleaning up link profile
-
I've recently been trying to tidy up my link profile. We have been link building for a number of years and I decided to check it out and see how good our profile looks.
I used OSE to give me a report of all external links pointing to pages on my www sub-domain. The results are scary!
I have hundreds of links point to my site that originate from URLs such as the following url which attempts to start a download, use caution!!!
<colgroup><col width="768"></colgroup>
| http://ftp.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/cxlinux/demo/install-crossover-pro-demo-9.0.1.sh?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=減量 |Another example (this one attampts to start a .jar download!! Be cautious)
<colgroup><col width="794"></colgroup>
| http://www.breastreconstructionguide.com/compare.jar?page=1892&username=DXDZSW |All the other metrics reported for the offending URLs seem ok, such as PA and DA. Also, many have meaningful page titles (as opposed to random characters) and nicely formed anchor text.
What I'd like to know is;
Are these links having a detrimental effect on my SERPs?
How does OSE find them since its a URL to a download?
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Thanks for your time.
Regards
Aran
<colgroup><col width="794"></colgroup>
-
Hi Aran,
Some of the links are gone from this latest crawl, more will be gone in November, and they should be almost all gone by December. See Rand's post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/november-2011-linkscape-update.
As I noted in the September index update, we have had some serious issues when crawling deeper on large domains and encountering binary files that contain code our crawler recognizes and treats as a link. To help stop this problem, we applied a black list to this index to stop a large number of the files folks had reported to us (our estimate is that ~40% of binary files are now removed). However, we know there's still more than a few of these in the database of links so we'll continue cranking away on solutions to remove them all. Our hope is to have them reduced in the next index (November) and nearly eliminated by the December index. If you're ever curious about the next/previous updates, you can always see data for them on our Linkscape calendar.
-
Thanks Keri, any ideas when the crawler will be bug free?
Its no fun trawling through thousands of links to weed out the dodgy data before I can rpesent the info to a client.
-
Hi Aran,
First, Don't Panic! You're actually seeing a bug in Linkscape/OSE that we're working on eliminating. What's happening is that as we make deeper crawls, the crawler is finding more downloadable files and chocking on them, and wrongly categorizing them as links. One of the Linkscape engineers has a good explanation over on this thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains.
Hope this helps, and so sorry for the confusion.
-
Hi Aaron,
First let me say that sometimes competitors will try to point spammy links to your site (they hope that the bad links will hurt your serps). Usually this will backfire on competition, and the links can actually help your serps. If you have a healthy domain age, and other legitimate links pointing to your site, Google shouldn't penalize you.
My best guess is that Google will just ignore the links that are low quality, but I don't think they will actually hurt you.
You can always submit a Google Webmaster Spam Report from your webmaster's account. Just explain to Google that you were not involved in setting up the links, and the you did not pay for them, nor do you endorse them.
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
-
Site Explorer shows links as followable but they have nofollow tags
Hello, I am looking at site explorer and sites linking to my site moneyfact.co.uk. I've got thousands of links showing as 'followable' but when i check them they have rel="nofollow" tags. e.g: http://www.dianomioffers.co.uk/partner/moneyfacts.co.uk/brochures.epl?partner=93&partner_id=93&partner_variant_id=33 Why would they show as followable when the links are nofollowed? Thanks Steve
Moz Pro | | SteveBrumpton0 -
External Followed Links History, number of links go down
I was reviewing Historical Domain Analysis and found that in last 2 month we lost almost 10000 external followed links. What this could be? is this real or just question seomoz crawling? 30voy1g.jpg
Moz Pro | | ctam0 -
What's Happened To OSE's External Links For My Site?
Hi, I'm just taking my first steps with Open Site Explorer. I've hit a problem that I'd be really grateful for some help with. I'm running a website (that I didn't create) and want to get a clear picture of the inbound links. When I enter the URL into the OSE search bar, there are no external domains listed under the 'Inbound Links' and 'Linking Domains' tabs. Only internal site links are registered. Setting the filters, "only external" + "pages on this root domain", under the Inbound Links tab, does bring up a list of external sites. But I haven't had to enter filters just to see a list of inbound links with any other sites. Also, the breakdown under the Linking Domains tab remains the same - only links within my site are shown. Does this ring a bell? Any ideas what I might be doing wrong, or what might be wrong with my site to cause this problem? Cheers for helping, Josh
Moz Pro | | JoshAustin460 -
Too many on-page links
one of my SEOmoz pro campaigns has given me the warning: Too many on-page links and the page in question is my html sitemap. How do i resolve this because I obviously need my sitemap. How do i get around this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice1 -
In OSE "Followed Linking Root Domains" = "links from homepages"
In OSE's, "Followed Linking Root Domains" are defined as "The number of root domains that have at least one followed link to a page or domain." Does this mean that if one of my competitors has, let's say, 1000 followed linking root domains, they have a link pointing to them on the homepage of 1000 other sites? Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | gerardoH0 -
Getting PA & DA off of a list of links
I have a list of links that I want to get PA and DA for each individual link, can this be done in some way other than one at a time? I've heard this can be done with excel and using api but I don't know the specifics of this.. Help would be appreciated
Moz Pro | | Fergclaw2 -
Over 90% of anchor text tends to be brand-name on OSE link profiles. Why?
I reported this as a bug in OSE, because often I explore these links and find that the pages include both a brand-name link AND a regular keyword link, but for some reason OSE was only reporting the brand-name link... This led me to wonder how many links this occurred for, and therefore whether or not to trust the fact that the majority of the sites I ran OSE on returned at least (in most cases, more) than 90% brand-name links. I understand that brand-name links are amongst the most important to obtain, but that it's also important to get anchor text for keywords to build a varied profile. Given this apparent flaw in OSE, is it wrong - in the case of very successful sites - to take this ~90% as being anywhere near the correct percentage of brand-name links that I should be aiming for as a proportion of the total profile? Extra Credit :)... And this may help potentially help resolve the issue: does "Inbound Links" tab in OSE just report links to the Root Domain, or to that and every other page on the site?
Moz Pro | | ZakGottlieb710 -
Links from External Sites not Showing on OpenSite or Google Webmaster Tools
Hi, I asked this in another post, but didn't get a solid answer. For several websites I manage, I have access to their Google Webmaster Tools. When I put the site through there, or the link:// or SEOMoz's OpenSite link reporter, I get not even a fraction of the links that I know are pointing to the websites in question. Some of these links are from home pages or side columns, and some are from articles keep within a website, like at Inc.com. I wondered if the links in question were not themselves being indexed, but if I do a very specific search, I can pull them up in the search results. Is it just common knowledge that these link tools are not accurate? And to assume that somehow, search engines really do see all of the inbound links, even if our reporting tools don't. Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | lilactree0