External Followed Links Over Time Nasty Drop HELP!
-
I had someone help me with SEO and they basically used some stupid form to get back-links I am still learning and have taken over my site to better do things right. I have had a major drop across the board since Panda and Pinguin and rightfully so from what I am seeing.
My question is: Google obviously removed the backlinks and SEO MOZ shows this in its report. Do I need to disavow these links still or can I just focus on link building properly? What is the best course of action here?
-
Francisco,
OSE won't always show all of your lowest quality links and what it does show may fluxuate. In addition to OSE, take a look at links showing at majesticseo and ahrefs.com, and even your google webmaster tools to get a fuller picture of your back links and which you may want to disavow.
-
Hello Mihai,
Bad choice of words on my part. I do not know if they are gone. How do I check this? From the looks of the report they are longer are there but do I need to do anything else? Will those old links continue to haunt me? Sorry for the questions
-
Hey francisco,
I'm not sure I understand, what do you mean when you say Google removed the backlinks? Google doesn't have control over websites that link to you (unless they're on Google's property, like the Blogger platform).
If the links (which, by the looks of that Moz report, were either on a big link network that was taken down or they were sitewide links on large websites) are actually gone, then there is no need to disavow them. Disavowing URLs/domains that have no links to you won't have any effect, even if they used to link to you in the past.
Hope this helps, cheers!
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
-
Massive Drop in Users
A client of mine is seeing crazy drops in users. Feb. 2018 was an all-time high in organic users, over 38,000. However, there has been a steep drop off since then. In November 2018, the number of organic users was at a little over 1,000. The client said there have been no major changes to the site. I have no idea what is happening. Below are things I have done already: - Submitted a disavow file- Fixed URL parameters- Performed an entire site audit. Fixed all site errors and re-wrote new metadata. - Made sure no main pages have been deleted. 301 redirects are in place where necessary. - Started to consolidate low-quality pages. If I had to guess, I would assume this is an E.A.T. related drop. I have no way of knowing though. This is a YMYL site, so we are working to increase E.A.T. However, any insight would be helpful. Rankings are dropping off so quick I'm not sure what else I can do. Please comment if you need more context. PLEASE HELP!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0 -
How many links can you have on sitemap.html
we have a lot of pages that we want to create crawlable paths to. How many links are able to be crawled on 1 page for sitemap.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
How do I deal with Negative SEO (Spammy Links)?
For the past 12 months, our website has been hit by spammy links with annoying anchor text. We suspected one of our competitor are deploying negative SEO on us. The image is an example of the sites and anchor text we have been spammed with. The frequency is about 1 - 2 spammy links a day. I have a few questions from here onwards: Does those links affect our SEO? (Most are mainly nofollow) Other than disavow, what other stuff can I do? How will google and other search engines see this incident? TcmFsti
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Changsst0 -
Do inbound links from forums hurt our traffic?
We have a manual action against us on Google webmaster tools for unnatural links. While evaluating our back links, I noticed that forums with low page rank/domain authority are linking to us. Is this hurting us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imlovinseo0 -
Hiding content or links in responsive design
Hi, I found a lot of information about responsive design and SEO, mostly theories no real experiment and I'd like to find a clear answer if someone tested that. Google says:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NurunMTL
Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details For usability reasons sometimes you need to hide content or links completely (not accessible at all by the visitor) on your page for small resolutions (mobile) using CSS ("visibility:hidden" or "display:none") Is this counted as hidden content and could penalize your site or not? What do you guys do when you create responsive design websites? Thanks! GaB0 -
Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?
I had a new site that was ranking on the first page for 5 keywords. My site was hacked recently and I went through a lot of trouble to restore it. Last night, I discovered that my site was nowhere to be found but when i searched site: mysite.com, it was still ranking which means it was not penalized. I discovered the issue to be a .htaccess and it have been resolved. My question is now that the .htaccess issue is resolved , will my site be restored back to the first page? Is there additional things that i should do? I have notified google by submitting my site
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | semoney0 -
External links without unnatural without my control
What should I do with links that Google considers link unnatural, but I have no control over them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus1110