How do you handle a site with inherited negative links, but no penalty?
-
I'm trying to rank a new client for various key phrases that contain "it support."
The problem is that about 100 of their 180 total referring domains have links that include "it support" (usually as partial match, or if exact then for uninteresting terms with low traffic), mostly on quite low quality directories.
So, no penalty, and not much exact match I'm worried about, but I'm concerned that there's too high a percentage overall of partial match or simpy "it support"-based links for me to continue building keyword-optimized links to try and rank for the much harder terms we need to rank for...
Despite the large number of low quality directories, a disavowal does not seem like a good idea since there is no penalty, but how does one avoid being handicapped by such bad links that came before one's time?
-
If the links are low quality disavow them, better to be proactive rather than wait for a penalty then having to go through the process anyway.
-
I agree with Vijay. If you know they are low-quality links you should act to have them removed.
We have a client with the exact same issue. They had paid an SEO in the past to do some work and it would appear that the majority of that work was building incredibly poor quality links, including, but not limited to, creating entire sites with links solely back to the client's site.
We've spent the last few weeks clearing up the bad links, and there is still more to be done. We did pre-warn the client that this work was going to be carried out and explained that there was a potential of a drop in rankings due to it. Fortunately in this case, due to the other work being carried out, we didn't see an overall drop.
I would hate to be having a conversation with a client in a few months once they've been hit with a penalty saying "Yes, we knew there was a problem, but we ignored it because it wasn't causing a direct issue at the time"
-
Thanks for the advice, but I don't think disavowing links without a penalty in place sounds like a good practice. Would love to hear from some others on this subject?
-
Hi There,
First of all have you reviewed all the links on link Quality metrics and analyzed it well?
Use this URL to measure the RIGHT link quality first:
https://moz.com/blog/7-link-seoOnce you are convinced these are not so high-quality links which don't provide you right traffic and audience, then you should not take it lightly. If your website is not impacted till now, it doesn't mean that it won't be impacted in future, google and other search engines are getting smarter by the day and don't ever be complacent or over-smart with search engines.
Disavow low-quality links and move on to build a higher quality link profile.
I hope this helps, feel free to respond and ask further questions.
Best Regards,
Vijay
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
-
Internal Linking
Hi, I'm doing internal anchor text links. Relative path. if I use /destination-page instead of https://website.com/destination-page will I still receive a transfer of internal Google trust to the destination page? Does google treat just the / url the same as full url??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scotty_Wilson0 -
What is future of Link building ? Any link building experts Here ?
Hey Everyone, its Muhammad Umair Ghufran I have one question about Link Building ? As my Knowledge Google Love the Quality content but Link building rank some low quality website Right ? So, what is the future of link building ; please explain indeep with complete reference for better understanding Thanks Regards: Muhammad Umair Ghufran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muhammadumairghufran0 -
In Google Search Results ....Is it a site link or what? How to get this?
Hello Experts, When I search in google any keyword like abcd in search results for one website after meta description there are showing few links of website ( image attached ) Can you please let me know what is this & how to achieve such type of links? Thanks! mdJBLYb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wright3350 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Manual action penalty revoked, rankings still low, if we create a new site can we use the old content?
Scenario:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
How to identify 404 that get links from external sites (but not search engines)?
one of our site had a poor site architecture causing now about 10.000s of 404 being currently reported in google webmaster tools. Any idea about easily detecting among these thousands of 404, which ones are coming from links from external websites (so filtering out 404 caused by links from our own domain and 404 from search engines)? crawl bandwidth seems to be an issue on this domain. Anything that can be done to accelerate google removing these 404 pages from their index? Due to number of 404 manual submission in google wbt one by one is not an option.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Or do you believe that google automatically will stop crawling these 404 pages within a month or so and no action needs to be taken? thanks0