Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links
-
Hi,
We are in the process of trying to remove a partial manual penalty for unnatural links. I would like to do a complete link audit of our site, where can I get complete data on sites linking to my website? Webmaster tools only appears to show the top 1000 domains.
Thanks
-
You'll get way more than 1000 links from WMT. It says you get links from the top 1000 domains but it's usually quite a bit more. I have had some spreadsheets from WMT that contain over 30,000 links.
John Mueller (Google employee) once said that WMT was all you needed in order to remove a penalty. So, for over a year that's all I used. However, in the last couple of months since Google has started to give examples of unnatural links when a site fails, many of those examples are not in WMT! I think what John meant was that you could see the patterns in WMT such as articles, directories, etc. and then use those patterns to find additional links. But, if you don't have a list of all of the links that you have made then that is not going to work for most people.
So, now, what I do is combine the links from WMT, ahrefs.com, majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. It's a pain. I've written a script that combines them for me but it still takes me quite a while to put them together.
With that being said, I have removed penalties from some sites by just using the WMT links. And then I've had other ones that Google has been really nitpicky on and has not removed the penalty until we addressed every single self made link.
-
I would recommend using Majestic SEO in this instance. So long as you are working on a website which you can verify as your own, you will be eligible to free link data from Majestic SEO. They can explain better than me:
http://blog.majesticseo.com/development/site-explorer-goes-free/
I hope you find this information useful.
-
It isn't free but Link Detox is quite handy for showing links/ showing which links need to be gotten rid of.
-
Hello, you should be able to find more links than a 1000 from Google Webmaster tools. It's also worth trying Bing and majestic as mentioned above. This is a great resource to get you on your way...
http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-create-an-excel-spreadsheet-to-remove-link-spam-post-penguin
Cheers,
Bill
-
moz or majestic should all let you do that
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
-
Tumblr links
I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement. But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them. I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap1 -
Can Google Bot View Links on a Wix Page?
Hi, The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code. Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page? Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable? Thank you SO much for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
Are Navigation links different to static links
We are trying to reduce the number of links on our homepage. We could remove some fly out navigation links, We rank 1st on Google for some of these links. Would removing these hurt our SEO. The links are accessible 1 level down if we remove the homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers0 -
Google places
Is there away to get to the top of google places? Can it be manipulated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dynamic080 -
Does Google count links on a page or destination URLs?
Google advises that sites should have no more than around 100 links per page. I realise there is some flexibility around this which is highlighted in this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru One of Google's justifications for this guideline is that a page with several hundred links is likely to be less useful to a user. However, these days web pages are rarely 2 dimensional and usually include CSS drop--down navigation and tabs to different layers so that even though a user may only see 60 or so links, the source code actually contains hundreds of links. I.e., the page is actually very useful to a user. I think there is a concern amongst SEO's that if there are more than 100ish links on a page search engines may not follow links beyond those which may lead to indexing problems. This is a long winded way of getting round to my question which is, if there are 200 links in a page but many of these links point to the same page URL (let's say half the links are simply second ocurrences of other links on the page), will Google count 200 links on the page or 100?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SureFire0