Hi Charles

There's actually a question that has a few answers and ideas to it located here. Check that out - there's some pretty good stuff there. Hope this helps out a bit!

Hi there

Check out URL Profiler - this tool is fantastic for pulling different metrics for URLs - single or bulk - for a multitude of reasons.

There are also other tools you can find through search, but I would stick with URL Profiler.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

It really depends on the link.

The best way to define a bad link is to use your own intuition and common sense:

• Does this link help my website?
• Is this link relevant to my website?
• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?
• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?
• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

I would go through a backlink audit - what needs to be removed / disavowed? Start there and assess. Truthfully, if the site is not indexed, it's not that big of a deal. I would just make sure that's it's relevant and a good link, because it could send traffic.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Kayleigh

This happens from time to time. Sometimes I will pull the URLs I get those 0 status errors for and recrawl them. It's no big deal, sometimes you just have to mess with the configuration of your crawls.

ScreamingFrog offers some tips in their FAQ section, you can read those here.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any more questions or comments.

Hi there

Have you considered running a backlink audit to see if you have any backlinks that need to be removed, disavowed, or updated?

Go through your backlinks and ask the following questions:

• Does this link help my website?
• Is this link relevant to my website?
• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?
• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?
• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

A lot of this relies on common sense, but just as you take in the good, you have to be ready to remove the bad. Your backlink profile requires regularly check ins, so be prepared to do this every so often (I try to do it 2 to 4 times a year).

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi again

Yeah, if this is representative of the other links, you should definitely look into those and either remove/disavow them.

That's just my two cents!

Hi there

A lot of this will come down to common sense and research. A couple of things I would point out:

Anchor text - Try and steer clear of exact match anchor text. It can trip spam filters if you have too much of that going on in your backlink profile. Try to make more use of branded anchor text. You can read morehere.

nofollow links - Don't disregard links because they are nofollow. They can be valuable and important, especially if that link is relevant to your business and helps expands your visibility to your audience. There's a great article here about nofollow.

PageRank - Google doesn't update this metric anymore. You can read more here. There are metrics elsewhere via OSE and more below that I list that you can find just as useful.

All in all - the best way to define a bad link is to use your own intuition and common sense:

• Does this link help my website?

• Is this link relevant to my website?

• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?

• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?

• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

• Are the links from directory templates? (example)

• Inspect URLs with blatant spam words

• Free

• Porn

• XXX

• Submit

• Directory

• Paid

• Links

• URL

• Sex

• etc.

• Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs

• This can usually show link farms or spam

Google views backlinks as who you associate with. If you hang out with shady people, you're probably a shady person. If you hang out with intelligent people, people probably think you're intelligent. Same applies for Google.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Pete

Take a look at this article from Search Engine Watch on how Google handles 410 codes.

In short, 404 means "page not found", while a 410 means "this page is gone and we do not expect it to come back". If this is in fact the circumstance - the page is gone, not coming back - then a 410 lets Google know that that is official, and you can now ignore this page.

A couple of things to note from the article from Matt Cutts...

"If we see a 410, then the site crawling system says, OK we assume the webmasters knows what they're doing because they went off the beaten path to deliberately say this page is gone," he said. "So they immediately convert that 410 to an error, rather than protecting it for 24 hours.

So when you do serve a 410 status code on a page that really isn't gone permanently, you haven't killed that page off permanently. Googlebot will return the check and see if the page needs to be returned to the index.

"Now don't take this too much the wrong way, we'll still go back and recheck and make sure are those pages really gone, or maybe the pages have come back alive again," Cutts said. "And I wouldn't rely on the assumption that that behavior will always be exactly the same.

"In general, sometimes webmasters get a little too caught up in the tiny little details and so if the page is gone, it's fine to serve a 404, if you know it's gone for real it's fine to serve a 410," he said. "But we'll design our crawling system to try and be robust so that if your site goes down, or if you get hacked, or whatever that we try to make sure that we can still find the good content whenever it's available." As far as why your 404s are appearing in your Webmaster Tools; I would check your internal links and make sure they are up to date, and also that your sitemap is up to date. If pages need to be redirected to more relevant pages, make sure those are doing so, otherwise, create a custom 404 page so that users can navigate or find what they need. 410s aren't usually necessary, so I would discuss with your SEO team their reasoning. Review what I passed over though!

Hope this helps, good luck!

Hi there

For my vote, I say no.

The best way to assess potential backlinks are to ask the following questions:

• Does this link help my website?

• Does it send quality traffic?

• Is this link relevant to my website?

• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?

• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?

• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

• Are the links from directory templates? (example)

• Inspect URLs with blatant spam words

• Free

• Porn

• XXX

• Submit

• Directory

• Paid

• Links

• URL

• Sex

• etc.

• Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs

• This can usually show link farms or spam

• Don't be quick to discount nofollow links - nofollow's do provide value, so as long as they pass your sniff test, don't remove them simply because of this tag

If you have to question a link or if it's worth obtaining, it's probably not worth obtaining in the first link. It's hard to explain, but a good link is something you just know is valuable when you see it, or one that you know is relevant enough to your website and fits perfectly in the content that it's linking from.

Directories like those you linked to here are only built for the reason of gaming the search engines and build mass amounts of links as quickly as possible. Google, and other search engines, understand this and are actively putting a stop to it and deranking sites with backlink profiles that contain fair amounts of these links.

My vote - avoid them - and acquire links naturally, it will benefit you so much more in the long run.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

Okay cool - didn't want to give you information you didn't need. I'd also take a look at the Moz SERP analysis - tons of great information there that can help guide you in the direction you should take with your efforts.

Good luck!