Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?
-
If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't. Is there any reason to remove them? If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.
-
Links that have been discounted do indeed factor into penalties. In fact, they're probably the links you want to remove FIRST because these are sites/pages that Google has already flagged. You should absolutely remove them, especially if you're under penalty of some sort.
Removing links is indeed a bit of a two-edged sword in that you often cut out some spam links that Google doesn't (yet) know about. That said, leaving the links in place is the poorer option in my view, as it prevents you from moving forward with a long-term strategy.
If all of your links are manipulative, it might be better just to start a new site rather than cleaning up to return to 0.
-
Again this issue has come up. Anyone with any insight into this:
-
If he has little-to-no natural, high authority links, changing to a new domain may be a better move.
-
Once again, it all comes down to "do you have real, natural, high quality links pointing to your site?" If you only have a couple, it may be easier to move domains and contact those link owners to point to new url. If you have many good links that would improve rankings, it may be easier to remove/disavow the bad links instead of getting all those links changed to point to new location.
-
Is it a bad idea for him to move the content to a new domain and be more careful about the links he acquires?
-
Thank you for the response. However, it's not what I'm looking for. I agree with the process my have mentioned for having penalty removed. However, I'm asking about this specific penalty:
Unnatural Links - Partial Match - affecting some links.
If Google has already discounted these links and my rankings dropped as a result. Is there any benefit to hiring a company for $1,000 to identify which links need to go and than pay $ per link to have them removed. Finally putting the rest in a disavow file and sending it into Google.
Say they do remove the "penalty" would it do any good. Did they discount the links AND hit my site with a penalty or did they just discount the links rendering having the "penalty" removed pointless.
-
Hi Beastrip,
In our opinion it wont make much difference for quit a while, however a ship shape website is what we should all strive for, and what Google likes most. If you were to put the hours of labor into correcting this issue the return on investment will disappoint you. So you should never let the problem get that bad, where you are being penalized in the first place. A clean ship will be handsomely rewarded, one that is in disrepair and neglected will not reach the same results, and will struggle to regain what it could have had if well maintained.
-
You should attempt to remove them and add them to disavow list. Then in the RR, mention what you've done to fix the penalty.
If your rankings are based mostly on the manipulated links, your rankings will drop hard (which is most often the case). Once the penalty is removed though, start working on obtaining natural links so you can return to ranking. If the page/domain has no natural links, it may be easier to just start fresh.
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
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Rel="prev" / "next"
Hi guys, The tech department implemented rel="prev" and rel="next" on this website a long time ago.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
We also added a canonical tag to the 'own' page. We're talking about the following situation: https://bit.ly/2H3HpRD However we still see a situation where a lot of paginated pages are visible in the SERP.
Is this just a case of rel="prev" and "next" being directives to Google?
And in this specific case, Google deciding to not only show the 1st page in the SERP, but still show most of the paginated pages in the SERP? Please let me know, what you think. Regards,
Tom1 -
"WWW" versus non "WWW" on domain
We plan on migrating our site to a new shorter domain name. I like the idea of removing "www" to gain an additional 3 letters in the URL display. Is there any disadvantage of doing so from a technical or SEO perspective? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Can I add external links to my sitemap?
Hi, I'm integrating with a service that adds 3rd-party images/videos (owned by them, hosted on their server) to my site. For instance, the service might have tons of pictures/videos of cars; and then when I integrate, I can show my users these pictures/videos about cars I might be selling. But I'm wondering how to build out the sitemap--I would like to include reference to these images/videos, so Google knows I'm using lots of multimedia. How's the most white-hat way to do that? Can I add external links to my sitemap pointing to these images/videos hosted on a different server, or is that frowned upon? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOdub0 -
SEO impact: Link categories on the description of the products
Hi, Is there any positive or negative SEO impact if I link product categories on the description of the products? Ex: At the product page of the Passenger Car Blue, a link to the Passenger Car category of the website on the product description. Or this is more a UX question?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
The product page already has a breadcrumb on top. Thanks!0 -
Is a "Critical Acclaim" considered duplicate content on an eCommerce site?
I have noticed a lot of wine sites use "Critical Acclaims" on their product pages. These short descriptions made by industry experts are found on thousands of other sites. One example can be found on a Wine.com product page. Wine.com also provides USG through customer reviews on the page for original content. Are the "Critical Acclaim" descriptions considered duplicate content? Is there a way to use this content and it not be considered duplicate (i.e. link to the source)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
Do "NoFollow" links provide any SEO value?
Do "nofollow" links provide any SEO value, particularly for Google? I have heard that they still can, since Google doesn't necessarily follow all of the tags. Is this true? Is there any value in obtaining nofollow links? Can they also hurt in any way? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold
Afshin Apples of Gold0