Old Linkwheel, should I remove?
-
I just found a 2yr old link wheel that was setup by a SEO co for my site, it has tripod/webs.com/other web 2.0 type sites.. 8 of them. Each web 2.0 site has about 40 links to it and a single link to my site.
Is it always best to get rid of all this stuff? I have login details for all the "web 2.0" sites. What if I paid a "designer" $5 to get a bunch of videos and images put on each site and then I wrote some text?
They would be useful sites to surfers, I could theme each site.I see all this about hunting down dubious links.. but the other day I went to one of the black style forums and the same people as years ago are selling packages with PDF/Doc submissions, private blog networks same old stuff. It does work as people keep buying and using and reviewing it.
If my link wheel hurts then what would stop me pointing it at my competitor? I wouldnt but...
Now a site that has a decent link profile, can they get away with a link wheel or two?
-
Hi Adam,
Oh yeah, I understand your point. And I do agree with you competitors can be ruthless in fact some people can have no moral center whatsoever.
I was simply bringing to light the fact of what Google actually goes to people that they do catch rather be something that happens very only or more frequently.
I apologize I came across as scolding or trying to tell you that you're doing something wrong. You actually did bring up something that is important for people to understand and I think it's important that anyone practicing search engine optimization should definitely never use the method of pointing bad links at competitors as Google I know that you understand I was not lying at all when I said how harsh Google is when they catch people that do practice illegitimate forms of search engine optimization or black hat methods in order to beat competitors vs beating them fair and square by creating higher quality content sharing it more frequently using all the tools at your disposal to essentially outrank somebody fair and square for the keywords that you want to record and hopefully they want reports well. I did not mean to say that you were doing anything bad.
Please except my apology if it came across as me saying that you were actually practicing those methods as I did not mean it to.
Respectfully,
Thomas
-
I was just making the point of how can google punish sites for things that others can so easily manipulate like pointing spam links their way.
Competitors can be ruthless, they steal your ideas and hurt you in any way they can.
I really don't like SEO advice on some kind of moral grounds, I think many SEO shops are preaching don't do linkwheels don't do this or that while they have their own private blog farms that they have nurtured for years or other tricks.
One of my competitors has 8 separate domains in the top 20, 4 in the first page.. KEYWORDsydney.com.au KEYWORDmelbourne.com.au also tow of the domains are sham blogs... I am an actual software creator and they are resellers of a software package so I am going to try to get some good links but still they will have plenty of realestate on page one.
But my old linkwheel is gone now!
-
I would use open Web Explorer to find out the quality of the links coming in. But the time you can do this simply by looking at it is most likely a link farm that you are talking about.
As far as pointing it at your competitors that is an extremely bad idea. I would definitely take the time to build links that are quality to your own website and trying to hurt your competitors. By the way that Google finds out that you have ever done anything like that they will most likely De index you immediately. They are not easy on people in a very done anything like that.
Spend your time working on your on-site and not focusing on hurting competitors. You'll prosper in the future you never know what Googles going to come up with next and they know a lot about what we're doing right now regardless of how much we think they know trustee they really do no more than we think. And they're taking that into consideration more more time passes.
If you find that these links are not high-quality do not have a high domain ranking or domain trust. I would then eliminate them this will help you rank higher. Thank you. Google's eyes when they're penalizing sites.
I hope I've helped you,
Thomas
-
It that's is the quality of the links, then remove them. At best they are not helping you, at worst they are looking like spam.
I am a programmer by trade and SEO second, I build new sites and my experiences lately is that you can rank quite well without many links or even none. I truly believe only good links are worth having most links either do nothing for you or hurt you.
-
They are all just the usual forum post links that go to those webly style pages..
The thing is that I will be left with virtually no links to my site after I remove these 8 pages that link
I have basicly just a nofollow crunchbase link as my only decent link.
I have a similar moztrust score to my competitors right now and just slightly less 27/100 DA.
The links I will pull them out of the pages and yeah I can always put them back in later. It does make sense that there never could be a valuable link coming from tripod...
-
I would get rid of it. I would expect that the links pointing at those sites are seen as part of a the same wheel. tiding up the sites will not fix the problem if that is the case.
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
-
Remove Old Poor Quality Links Proactively?
I'm working with an ecommerce site where various predecessors have created 5 Wordpress.com blogs containing 5 links on each back to the site. Should I disavow those links and take down those sites if I can get access? Should I close a second YouTube channel and Google Plus account under another name set up to create links back to the site? No penalties yet. Advice much appreciated.
Link Building | | PegCorwin0 -
Should I be taking a gradual approach to link removals?
Quick background: My parents run a travel company and have seen their google ranks drop dramatically in the last few years (usual story: they employed an SEO agency, saw good results to begin with, and then a massive decline in their rankings post-Penguin). Over the last few months I've been working to remove as many of the spam links pointing to their site as I can. However, as I've been doing so, our keyword rankings have been declining even further, not improving. This time last year we were bottom of page 1 for one keyword, then we suddenly dropped to page 5 around Nov with the Penguin update, and now, since I started cleaning up our backlinks, we're no longer in the first 20 pages - we've vanished. Similar situation for other keywords (though not as dramatic) I've been pretty careful to only delete links that are clearly spam (article directories, forum signatures, spam comments on blogs with a keyword-rich username linking to our domain etc). It may be that some of these links were still helping us, but I'd be surprised - they were pretty obvious cases of spam. My question: Is it normal to see this sort of decline at the start of a clean-up campaign? Does google see a sudden decline in the number of links, spam or otherwise, as suspicious? I've devoted weeks already to trying to work on the problems affecting my parent's website, and the situation just seems to be getting worse and worse! Do websites ever recover from a severe Penguin hit?
Link Building | | mgane0 -
Toxic Link Removal-Better to Pay an SEO Firm or Can I Do It Myself?
Hi Jen: Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. They are of the opinion that it is imperative to remove the toxic domains. The fee for toxic link removal is about $3,000.I would prefer to save the $3,000 but would prefer not to take the risk of screwing up my ranking if this is a complex procedure best left to SEO professionals. My assumption is that link removal will involve identifying the toxic domains, requesting removal and eventually submitting a Google disavow request. Can I do this myself or is there a big risk of screwing it up? Assuming it is safe for me to remove toxic links, would anyone suggest software of tools for doing so? Thanks so much.
Link Building | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
SEO Consulting Agency for Strategy and Link Removal
We need your guidance on SEO Agency we can consult for strategy planning for our websites. We received manual Partial penalty on both domain few months back and since then have seen tremendous fall in rankings for both of the domains. Have been trying to remove all spam links we found out of links we got from webmasters and disavow one's we were not able to get removed. But yet request for penalty removal not accepted. Would appreciate your concern on helping us out if we can take help of some agency for aggressively getting our spam links removed and plan for a better strategy to improve our rankings. Please suggest one of the best in this domain we could reach.
Link Building | | amitjain0 -
Will removing a 301 re-direct from an old spammed URL drop the links from our profile?
Essentially there is an old page that has been the target of an old school link building agency. There is a 301 re-direct from the old page to the newer version. if I drop the 301 re-direct and update our sitemaps. Will those links be removed from our profile? The old URL passes nothing in actual value & a link building campaign has been running on the new page for over a year.
Link Building | | BenjyH0 -
Old links
I am looking to remove some old directory links that now look spammy. Some years ago the site was redesigned. The links are all to the old pages url, which is 301 redirected to the new. If we remove the 301 and let the page 404, will that suffice in Googles eyes?
Link Building | | cottamg0 -
How to save links from an old website when building a new website even if the site map changes?
I have a client that needs a new website with better navigation, etc. The site has been up for a number of years and has backlinks that I would like to keep when building the new site in WordPress.
Link Building | | Doug_Hay0 -
Keeping our old links
Hello Forum I just worked on redoing an eCommerce website and part of the revisions were to change the site's URL structure. What I'm curious about is how to maintain the external links we had prior to redoing the website so that these external links continue to point to their respective product pages on the new website. From what I understand, you need remap the old links to the new links in your CMS and set up 301 redirects. What's the easiest way to find the all the old link URLs and remap them? Or is there a different, easier way?
Link Building | | pano0