How do I go about removing low authority, crappy, backlinks?
-
How do I go about getting rubbish backlinks on a clients websites removed? The links were created by a previous companies link building campaign, and I believe this (along with a few other things) could be the reason for their poor SERP's as they are an established website.
Can I alert Google and get them to discredit the links, or do I manually have to try to make contact with the owners/webmasters of the websites to get the links removed?
All help appreciated!
Thanks
-
Last time this happened, I identified the SEO agency, got some advice from a specialist lawyer, and then issued a take-down request in the strongest terms (though with bad backlinks being replaced with good backlinks). It worked.
-
Justin,
I'd also like to suggest that instead of trying to get the low quality links removed, it will be a better option to try and obtain higher quality links.
Manoj
-
Hi Justin, I take it that you've not had any other signs that you've been penalised. You've not received any warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools or had the clients pages vanish from the search results completely? They still have pages in the index?
You mention that you're trying to recover from a previous companies link-building activity. How much information do you have to work with?
Do you have any historic ranking reports? Do you know how the rankings have changed and when? Can you find out what the position was before they started their link building and how it's changed over time?
Can you establish how badly your client has been affected? Do you have access to the site's analytics? Can you see/quantify any sudden loss of search traffic etc?
Personally I'd start by taking a good look at the SERPS for the chosen keywords and seeing how strongly your clients pages are likely going to compete.
In your view, with a cynical SEO eye, do the pages deserve to rank higher than the competition?
How would your client react if you put their page and a competitors ranking page side by site and asked them to say honestly which one was best? (I don't recommend that you do this unless you know how they'll respond!!)
-
Hi Caroline. My guess would be that they're not being directly penalised, but are suffering because their inbound links are coming from what Google sees as low ranking, low-quality, low value-add sites such as, but not always, content farms etc.
If you suspect this to be the case it's really important to look beyond the headline "linking root domains" number and look at the domain/page authority of those linking domains.
If you were trying to differentiate good content from bad - would you look at the number of votes, or the number of votes from respected sources? (Espectially when you know that people are trying to game the system by building lots of "easy" low quality links.)
This is of course just my opinion. I'd love to know if there any evidence for actually "link penalties".
-
@doug
Thanks for the quick answer, I think that @caroline's point/question is also of main concern. I am happy to leave the links as long as I can dilute their (potentially negative) effects by gaining quality, authority links, but I would expect from the first Panda update, that backlinks from link farms/directories would carry no authority and therefore would have little to no effect on the website that they were linking to.
-
Doug could I ask you a question?
I've noticed that in the last few months people have attributed their decrease in the rankings to 'being penalised for bad links'.
It is the case that they were previously gaining benefits from those links and that with the recent changes these links go back to 0 influence, reducing their rankings to what they previously were, as opposed to the links having a negative impact on their sites?
-
You won't get Google to do anything about them, but Google have said that "crappy backlinks" won't hurt you, they just won't be worth much anything.
(Backlinks obtained in an underhand unethical manner might though...)
If you really want to get the links removed you'd need to contact the individual webmasters. This is likely to take lots of time/effort that you're almost certainly better off spending doing some high-quality link building or content creation.
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
-
Competitor Ranks Top Keywords Without Backlinks
One of my competitors is ranking very well for many different competitive keywords (1k+ searches per month). I'm trying to figure out how in the world he is ranking so well. I've signed up for MozPro and looked at his back-links. He has 1 branded site-wide back-link from a decent blog. He also has 1 contextual back-link from a decent blog. Other than these 2 back-links, the rest are garbage links unlikely to even count for anything (he has maybe 12 of these low quality back-links). My website on the other hand has more than 15 back-links from different (high quality) websites and does not rank anywhere near this competitor. This leads me to believe that either MozPro back-link reporting is inadequate or there is foul-play on the part of my competitor. As far as on-page SEO is considered, his website is far inferior. Therefore, I highly doubt this would play a role. What are some reasonable approaches I can take to better understand the cause of this discrepancy. Clearly the back-link reporting has not revealed any answers.
Competitive Research | | poke10 -
2 sites with low DA and PA and unoptimised <title>outranking everyone for competitive search term - How ?</title>
Im doing some keyword research for a new client, Ive found 2 anomalies for competitive search terms where sites with unoptimised <title>tags, poor backlinks and other stats, (compared to the other sites listed in the SERP) are out ranking everyone and claiming the #1 spot</p> <p> The 2 search terms are :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Interior designers London</a>- #1 new-id.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=new-id.co.uk&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=interior+designer+london">Interior designer London</a>- #1 nstudio.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnstudio.com%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> </ul> <p> (interestingly they hardly rank at all for any modification of those search terms)</p> <p> The only thing i could think of is that they both had some really good links using that exact anchor text, but ive been checking OSE for the past month both in the backlinks and the just discovered but couldnt see anything like that.</p> <p>I conducted the SERP checking from a laptop with a broadband connection based in London, although im not very local to either of these locations im about an 8th of the cities distance away from one of those location and about half a cities distance away from the other. So i dont think its a local skew thats causing the SERP rankings.</p> <p>For both sites i can see they had old domains which now redirect to the them :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">New-id.co.uk = </span><span data-mce-mark="1"><a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnewidinteriors.com&no_redirects=1&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - PA1, DA1</span></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">Nstudio.co.uk = intarya.com - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=www.intarya.com&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - Da 32, PA43</span></p> </li> </ul> <p> Although the intarya domain was quite strong with good backlinks (but nothing above par comapred to the other sites the nstudio.co.uk site is now outranking, the anchor text was mostly natural with only some keyword anchor text from PA1 pages. </p> <p>The <a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> didnt seem to have a backlink profile, both PA1 and DA1.</p> <p> Ive taken screenshots of the SERP pages below, but feel free to dig further</p> <p>Any idea what's going on here ?</p> <a download="HWkjmDf.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/HWkjmDf.png" target="_blank">HWkjmDf.png</a> <a download="A70jXse.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/A70jXse.png" target="_blank">A70jXse.png</a></title>
Competitive Research | | mike8780 -
Why has my authority article gone from P1 to below the top 50? Along with the rest of my site...
My site has run into some serious and unexplained SEO issues over the last 6 months, i.e: I wrote the content at http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/flat-roof-insulation/ about 3-4 years ago, and ever since it's competed for position with the huge PLC websites and hovered around the top 3 spots in google.co.uk. However, since May this year things have declined rapidly and now isn't even in the top 50 for [flat roof insulation]! Why?? I am aware that this content has been pretty heavily plagiarised since day 1, with some other sites making the effort the 'rehash' my wording and others just blatantly copying. At the same time it's also been relatively well linked to (for a very boring subject) since day 1. Over the same period (since May) the site has suffered a huge decline in traffic and rankings, as can be seen here http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Capture.png, but I find the huge drop harder to justify for a relevant article than for the homepage/site in general. What strikes me about the above is the two step changes in traffic volume; one in early June and the other in late October. I am vaguely aware of the penguin update etc, but it seems to me like I've been manually banished somehow? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Competitive Research | | Biota0 -
Open Site Explorer is not showing dmT. Where do I go to get this metric.
Just trying to understand the video I watched on Link Building w/ Open Site Explorer. I'm not seeing the dmT metric in the live version. Has it been replaced by something else. Or is there someplace else I need to look for it?
Competitive Research | | AhmadS0 -
Why OSE cant show competitor backlinks , please could you help?
Today i am searching for backlinks in OSE but it cant go to result pages, can anyone help me why OSE cant work today.
Competitive Research | | conversiontactics0 -
"Linking Root Domains" Authority 100 ?
In All of my competiitors appears Wordpress.com, google.com, w3.org, yahoo.com and all of them have Domain Auth. 100. How is it possible? And how can in get links from domains like thath.
Competitive Research | | pageup5550 -
My site is ranked in the top 5 for my keywords, but howcome I'm low in an organic search results for my key words?
Are the other factors such as page rank, Alexa rating and mozRank used to determine where I will show up in search results, over Goggle's key word rank for my key words?
Competitive Research | | allstatetransmission0 -
How does TTH have only 220 Domain Backlinks?
Was looking at these guys today http://www.tentonhammer.com/ One of the orginal games websites, an authority in its niche and 7 years old (about as long as that niche has existed) Its all unique, high quality content but it has a only 220 linking domains, including BBC etc It doesnt make any sense to me that this website should have so few linking domains. Anyone have a thought as to whats going on here? S
Competitive Research | | firstconversion0