Can 302's Negate Spam Link Profile?
-
To make a long story short, the previous SEO company we hired spammed us on LOTS of crappy links, many of which are still indexed. We're currently in the act of removing these links before we receive a manual spam penalty/notification + building new, stronger links to balance out our profile.
While most of these garbage links were sent to our homepage, many are linking our Services page (and a bunch to our .com/sitemap.html for some reason, lol).
Now we're in the midst of updating our entire website and the permalinks are going to change. While I'd normally 301 our old links to the new ones, Id rather not bring the horrible link profile with it if at all possible.
Would a simple 302 redirect effectively dodge the bad juju from these spam links to our Services page since they pass 0 juice? Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
Thanks!
-
Hey Carson,
Thanks for the response. 404/410ing was going to be my game plan initially, but I was curious if a 302 was "better" than returning dead pages. In either case, it's only a few pages so I don't think it matters much. Our traffic was from this page being used across our local citations which did receive referral traffic. They've since been changed to our root URL, so no worries on not 301'ing or 302'ing that link. 404 it is.
The majority of the bad links are to our root domain, so I've been busy lately sending removal requests and such and preparing out disavow sheets. I was hoping for an "easier" fix to simply get rid of the dead pages, but killing them does indeed seem best.
I guess I'll go with the original plan to kill the pages which have the bulk of the spammy links, 301 the "cleaner" old structures without links aimed at them, and continue trying to remove the spammy links to the root URL.
Thanks for the input!
-
Hi there,
Sorry, I thought I answered this! I think I lost my internet connection for a bit.
On pages where you have no good links you want to salvage AND no significant incoming (organic/referred) traffic, I would just return a 410 response code and kill them off entirely.
On pages where you have no good links but you do receive traffic, I would 302 redirect them.
On pages with good and bad links, I would either leave them (200) or 301 redirect them, clean up the links as best you can, and disavow those spammy domains (or pages, in fewer cases) that are spammy if they fail to take their links down.
Hope that helps!
-
Does anyone have any insight into this issue?
-
Hey George,
Thanks for the response.
1. I am not concerned with the old link structure losing juice from quality links as their simply are none. The only links built to our non-root URL are spam from the SEO package that was purchased in the past. And even if there were a few decent links, the ratio between quality and spam is so out of whack that it'd be a worthy venture if we could ditch the spam links IMO.
Also, the non-root URL pages these links have targeted that I want to 302 aren't anything I'm interested in ranking for down the line. They were our About Us pages and our Sitemap. I'd just like to distance our domain from these spam links at any cost and start "fresh."
2. The upgraded page has been completely rewritten, so there's no risk of duplicate content issues when the new site goes live. It's entirely different from the current version. The old URL is also going to be removed from the domain entirely, so I'd imagine Google would eventually remove it from the index.
I'm planning on submitting a disavow sheet down the line, but that's a last resort if link removal and tactics like these can't help clean up my profile.
Thanks for the help.
-
Hi,
You're far from being alone with the issues you described, but personally I wouldn't recommend what you're suggesting:
- Using a 302 from the old to new URL structure will impact every link pointing at the old URLs be they a quality or spam backlink.
- Using a 302 rather than a 301 means there's a good chance that Google will index both the old and new URLs and cause duplicate content and PageRank splitting issues. This is likely to make things worse for you.
If I was you I'd disavow the spam links per Google's policy (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en), set up 301s to your new URLs and following a bit of patience, start your SEO afresh with a clean slate.
George
@methodicalweb
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
-
How can I tell if a site is trustworthy and is not / hasn't been penalized by Google?
Hello Moz Community, I'm looking to do some link building for a client and I would like to know if there's a way to find out if a website is trustworthy and is not or hasn't been penalised by Google. Thank you.
Link Building | | CosminC0 -
Best Tool For Diagnosing A spammy Back Link Profile
Buongiorno from the river Wharfe 🙂 With Googles crusade to penalise sites with dodgy backlink profiles I'm looking for an automated tool which could flag up any dodgy links. Yes ive used Open Site Explorer but I really am after something that gives me a simple "yes theres a problem and heres where it is" type solution. Any inights welcome 🙂
Link Building | | Nightwing
Grazie tanto,
David0 -
How can I find and fix my broken links
There are a number(110) links that SEOmoz has found to have 404 errors. I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist. I cannot even find the links in our system in wordpress. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Is there a way to locate where the links are originating from?
Link Building | | careerealism0 -
Do links from the second page of an article pass link juice?
I have been writing for some sites with a high overall page rank and the articles are being viewed as quality by search engines as well. However, they usually put a link to my site at the very end of the article and then break the article down into two pages to increase ad revenue. It seems that I'm not getting much credit for that link even if the page has a high SEOmoz/PR score. I want to know if I am getting the benefit from these links. If not, how do I make sure I get the most bang, even if my link is on a second page of the article? Here is an example of what I mean: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/
Link Building | | LawrenceWatkins0 -
Diversified Link Profile?
Hello,, I was wondering what type of ratio I should follow when building links to a page on my site? Broad, Exact, Phrase, Image? Is there a percentage I should shoot for? When you build links do you generally setup an excel spread sheet and watch to see what sticks using the seomoz link too? Last question, When I am building links, should the anchor text in the content Im publishing be a keyword I am trying to rank for in a search? Typically I try to rank for only 2-3 words per page. Sorry for all the questions, any help would be appreciated! I have a competitor that is spamming to death with Press Releases quite often, and the are bouncing ahead of us with Very Low Page Authority. Thank You!!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Link profile looking unnatural
Hello, I checked out link profile and noticed that we have 169 linking root domains with 501 links containing the same KW anchor text - all pointing to our homepage. I found out that it's actually a friend of the owner who is getting the links as a favor. All links were in a short time, and it's making our link profile look unnatural. The linking root domains look like... www. iraqculturalattache-prague .org/ I did notice a positive increase in rankings for the KW; however, i'm sure that this will be short lived, as Google will pick up on the unnatural link profile. Should i ask that he remove the links? Or just leave them? I don't want out website to be penalized. Thanks!
Link Building | | ShaneO0 -
How can I reduce nofollow links to get better rankin?
In my campaign there are lots of nofollow links while my competitors dont have those links and they are better ranked in search results. What should I do to decrease thos nofollow links?
Link Building | | tanveers0 -
How does Google interpret articles or prepositions in languages where it's attached to the (key)word?
Hi, All! This is for any foreign language SEOs where articles or prepostitions such as "the" "to" "in" or anything else are actually part of the word they are modifying and not a separate word, as in English: How does Google understand those words on-page and in anchor text? If you want to optimize for the word "house", and your content/anchor text says "the house" or "in the house" (again, all one word) - what does Google count that as? Does it count toward "house"? Does it count toward "in the house" only? Does it count toward "house" but not as much as if you had just put "house"? I end up sometimes writing slightly grammatically-off content because I want to optimize for the keyphrase - but is that necessary? Obviously different languages might be different, but you can probably project a little from one to the others. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | debi_zyx0