Links from non existant sites?
-
Hi! I'm new at all this I've taken a look at the backlink profile for one of my sites as it's seems its been hit by this last Penguin update. I'm finding links to my homepage from sites that no longer exist, like this one: http://mikimoto-pearls.org - does this hurt my backlink? I mean, I would figure it does since there's nothing there? If so, how do I get the link removed? Do I even need to? Disavow tool maybe?
Thank you!
-
Just because a site is down doesn't mean it won't go back up again. It could be temporarily suspended or the domain could have expired by mistake or it could eventually get 301'd from another domain. If it's a toxic link I would still treat it as being toxic and disavow it to be safe in case it goes live again. But yea, there is nothing to request to take down and if it stays 404ing it won't hurt you.
-
Yes, you have helped me a great deal. Thank you for your time.
-
Well yes, I guess you could look at it like that. If you lose a strong link then that could potentially reduce your domain/page authority. If you have been hit by penguin chances are you will have many more bad links than good though.
I would be careful about using the disavow tool without doing a full analysis of your link profile. Check out this recent post that runs down on the whole disavow procedure and has links for more info on identifying low quality links and trying to remove them: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
Hope that helps!
-
Oh - one other question - if the links no longer exist, that could be hurting me, in a round about way though, right? I mean, what if it was a good link and now it's gone? Too many of those will cut my backlink profile and therefore push down my keyword rankings, correct?
-
Hi Lynn,
Thank you so much for your quick response! I guess I just need to keep on looking!
-
HI,
If the site no longer exists and the link no longer exists then no this is not hurting you. The moz data can be a few weeks out of date depending on when it last scanned that page/domain so it is normal to sometimes see references to links that are no longer there. If you have been hit by penguin then it is the dodgy links that ARE still there that will be doing the damage!
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
-
EDU Links to my Site Never Show in Webmaster Tools
I have legit links from about a dozen .EDU sites. We do training for Universities. The links never show up in webmaster tools "Links to Your Site' and considering how many we have its amazing our rankings aren't better. It's almost as if google is ignoring them. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | gundogs0 -
I have links coming from spammy sites that DO NOT exist anymore... Disavow or not?
Hi There !!! I´m cleaning the link profile of one of our sites and making the typical analysis I have found the following scenario: All SEO tools that helped me to gather the data (WMT, opensite, majestic) are showing me that I have links coming from spammy sites that actually are not online any more. In other words, the spammy site where the link is coming is not alive (when I try to check the page itself I´m having a 404 or domain expired). My main question is… Should I disavow these domains links? or should I simply ignore them? We got an unnatural penalty and we are doing the whole proccess (checking sites, contacting, etc….). Many Thanks for your help
Link Building | | AutoEurope0 -
Do links from between common sites you run count as "bad" links?
Hi everyone,
Link Building | | AMA-DataSet
Iv recently been asked to review a group of sites. There are 3 sites, each of these sites has a link to the other two sites within the footer or the navigation.
These site are about a similar topic each provides a different perceptive or aims at a specific section of the industry so its not like the links are to irreverent sites. However because the links are in a global section they are repeated thousands of times on each site and count for a large proportion of the link profile to each site, I don't think this is good practise and I want to remove them or at least add a no-follow but my client insists they are relevant to each other and doesn't not want the links removing. What would be best in this situation? remove them? no-follow them? or leave them? Thank you in advance,
Liam0 -
Can competitors pay to have spammy sites link to your website?
Is there anything stopping competitors from doing a negative text-linking campaign against your site to purposefully harm your business?
Link Building | | mbelsito0 -
Trying to get links to a pdp of an ecommerce site
hi all i am working for a ecommerce site doing seo and i am thinking of starting a blog for one of the brands im trying to rank for on the site and then have some links from the brandreview.co.uk/blog to the pdp page of the ecommerse site that im working for, is this a good way to go about things
Link Building | | Westernoriental0 -
RSS links vs. contextual links
Which has more value? Passes more "link juice"? Auto generated rss links or contextual links?
Link Building | | nicole.healthline0 -
When looking at my site in open site explorer the top results are very dodgy spam and porn sites backlinking to us. Is this having a negative impact on our site?
When using open site explorer to check out who is linking to us I was surprised that the top results are spam and porn sites. These are completely irrelevant links. Does this have a negative impact on our site? What can we do to combat this?
Link Building | | AudioBobby0 -
How do you find out what (and when) new websites are linking to your site?
I may be missing the obvious here, but is there any way (a programme or site) of seeing what new links come into your site? Obviously as anyone who works in SEO, I like to see which links we have got with the work we put in contacting webmasters, etc. But is there a better way than just manually looking through ALL the links? Any help will appreciated.
Link Building | | Weerdboil0