Too many links?
-
I've recently taken over a site from another agency, which has hundreds of linking root domains. These domains are of very low quality and, in my opinion, are being ignored by Google.
Is it best to 'clean up' some of these links, or leave them and start building quality links?
I just don't want to waste time cleaning link profiles if there's no need.
-
If they're really just low quality (spun articles, blog comments, etc.), then I agree with Casey. You can cause more trouble taking a machete to your links - move forward with stronger, better links, and the past will probably be forgiven. My only caveat is that if these links appear to be paid or farmed, I might be a bit more aggressive with removing some of them.
-
Thanks Casey,
It's good to have a second opinion. I'll leave as is for the time being.
-
Hi Elias,
Its been in my experience and what I have heard that you can just keep them as is. Just as you were thinking of Google ignoring these links, they probably are.
We took over for a similar situation, almost all of the hundreds of current links were from low quality forum and other profile links. We left them as is and after a couple months of real link building the rankings started to climb with no problem.
If there are any links on sites with illegal content, then I would concentrate on removing those links.
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
-
What do you tell customers about outbound links?
Do you report outbound link profiles in an SEO audit? If so, what tools do you use to get outbound links? Moz doesn't seem to include this info in its crawl. What do you tell customers about the SEO value of outbound links? Thanks in advance for your SEO wisdom!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Location Links in Footer
Our business is in 10 cities. We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location. We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service). It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times. However, we want to improve organic results. We of course have Google Places listings for each city. From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer? I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page? We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9640 -
Spammy Inbound Links
Hello, We have been using Zendesk to manage our customer support tickets for approx 2 years. We recently noticed that the attached forum had lot's of spam comments attached to it. Promoting Viagra and the like. The system was installed as a subdomain of my site support.mysite.com We have since deleted our account with Zendesk but Moz and Google are reporting loads of inbound links to that subdomain that are all total spam with Viagra in the anchor text etc. The subdomain no longer exists and now throws a 404. Can these links still hurt me? Is there other steps I need to take? I have disavowed all the links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niallfred0 -
How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
OSE provides Spam analysis for website link profile, Do Moz have a tool to check the link quality before placing a link? How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward1 -
Thousands of Links from mrwhatis.net
Google WMT shows that there are thousands of links pointing to the pages of my website from mrwhatis.net. Among the links, hundreds of them have the same anchor text. Here are some examples. http://mrwhatis.net/a-canon-in-music-for-kid.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pianomother
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-chords-piano-in-c.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-chord.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-mp3-free-downloa.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-sheet-fre.html and more.... The links pointing to my site on the above pages share the same link title "Canon In D Sheet Music | Canon In D Music Score". My question is - are these links considered unnatural links by Google based on your experience? Why and why not? I want to get some ideas before I ask Google to disavow these links. Thanks. John0 -
How many pages to 301 Redirect
Hi Mozzers, My site has 11,200 pages indexed in Google and I'm looking to remove some of the lesser content which should probably have been picked up by Panda. However these pages work out to about 1,100 in total and I'm not sure whether to remove these bit by bit or just do it in one fell swoop? Does Google not like a site's indexed pages fluctuating too quickly? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0 -
Flow of internal link equity
I've recently come across this: A site changes the URL of one internal page to something more search friendly, and 301's the old to the new as you would expect. They don't change the link on the homepage in the navigation. Instead they keep it to the old URL so they go through the 301 to get to the page even though it's internal. They say if they change the URL it will reset the internal flow of link equity to that page. I've not come across this before and so am not sure what to think. I mean I can see what they're saying but I would have though that it being internal would mean it's different and that the flow to internal pages would just kind of resume as-was quite soon afterwards. Any views?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10