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Hi All!

I have been observing a vigorous fickle in my rankings since past two months. Some first page keywords have moved to the second page.

Some of my observations from the backlink audit rose below questions:

Q1. Are large # of backlinks from "feed URLs" harmful in any way? If yes?
Q2. Am I supposed to get webmasters take these down or block their own feed URL?
Q3. The backlinks come in huge numbers from reliable websites. Do I need to remove the backlinks just because of the huge number?
Q4. What factors to look for if rankings started fluctuating in past 2 months?

Note: these backlinks from "feed" are from the websites who posted our editorials.

Backlink Example: http://xyz.com/categories/abc/feed/

Main Page: www.domain.com/service
Duplicate Page: www.domain.com/products-handler.php/?cat=service

1. My page was getting indexed properly in 2015 as: www.domain.com/service
2. Redesigning done in Aug 2016, a new URL pattern surfaced for my pages with parameter "products-handler"
3. One of my product landing pages had got 301-permanent redirected on the "products-handler" page
MAIN PAGE: www.domain.com/service GETTING REDIRECTED TO: www.domain.com/products-handler.php/?cat=service
4. This redirection was appearing until Nov 2016.
5. I took over the website in 2017, the main page was getting indexed and deindexed on and off.
6. This June it suddenly started showing an index of this page "domain.com/products-handler.php/?cat=service"
7. These "products-handler.php" pages were creating sitewide internal duplicacy, hence I blocked them in robots.
8. Then my page (Main Page: www.domain.com/service) got totally off the Google index

Q1) What could be the possible reasons for the creation of these pages?
Q2) How can 301 get placed from main to duplicate URL?
Q3) When I have submitted my main URL multiple times in Search Console, why it doesn't get indexed?
Q4) How can I make Google understand that these URLs are not my preferred URLs?
Q5) How can I permanently remove these (products-handler.php) URLs?

All the suggestions and discussions are welcome! Thanks in advance!

Thanks!

Thank you for the response. Though we do not have many such instances in our backlink profile, to be on the safer side I resolved this by getting those comments deleted. Contacting the Webmasters proved to be of help.

Now, until the entire Directory website gets reindexed those backlinks would still show up for my website. But as you said, Google understands...

Your answer resolved my query well. Thanks again!!

One of my website's link is placed over a comment. This website has a "recent comments" section in the footer which is hence appearing on all the websites pages. All tools including - Google Search Console, Majestic and MOZ are showing 45000+ links from that root domain.

Questions:

1. Are these links harmful to my rankings?
2. Should I get all those links disavowed?
3. Should I disavow the root domain or leave the link that lies on the home page?
4. What if there are up to 10 links coming from a domain? is that harmful too?
5. Apart from disavowing, is there any other option to get this fixed? If at all this counts as an issue...

Thanks in advance!!

I have lot of links (10000+) built against Exact match anchor text so what is solution to that now?

Other than disavowing them all, May I change the anchor text of those links (From Exact Match To Brand Name or naked URL)?

Does Google have algorithms to detect anchor text changes and if so, do those algorithms detect these sorts of changes and raise a red flag on sites doing it.

I respect your opinions but please only comment if you are sure about it because I am already facing a penalty so can't afford to get another.