Accidental Link not being removed by Google WMT
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I operate two sites for a client. One is a local business and one is their national business. I used the same template for both sites (with changes) but accidentally left a link in the footer to the local site. Now the local site is showing 12k backlinks from the national site. I removed the link over 2 weeks ago but it still shows up in Google WMT in the "Links to your Site" section. It goes to a coupon page and not a "targeted" page but 12k links to the local site is 6 TIMES what I had before.
My question is:
"Is there a way to get Google to remove the link from Google WMT?" More specifically force it. Like I said the link has been removed for over 2 weeks but it still shows up in the Local site's Incoming Links section of WMT.
Thanks.
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Mat is accurate on his response, it takes quite some time for WMT to remove links. For example, I removed 15k links in March, but Google didnt crawl all those links and remove them from WMT until June.
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The links are pointing to particular Coupons that are on the local website. I'm concerned about the large number of links (spike in links) and how Google will judge it.
Thanks for your info.
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When you remove a link you need to wait for Google to recrawl those pages and then update it's index. So, if you had links from 12,000 pages then Google has to go through all of those again and update it's record of them. If the pages are deep or on a low authority domain that could take a while. It might take a lot longer than 2 weeks.
If the links are not pointing to the home page you could consider 404ing the URL that they point to. That would prevent anything negative passing down those links.
In reality though, your best bet is most likely to sit tight and wait for them to update. They'll annoy you a bit in the mean time, but unless there is anything worrying about the other domain they are not likely to cause harm coming from just one domain.
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