Removing a link to a 404 page
-
Hi guys,
If I found a low quality or spam link pointing to my site, but the link points to a 404, 500, etc (inaccessible, error page),
Should I bother asking him to remove the link?
Thanks
-
Just to clarify - the page on your site no longer exists (404s/500s/etc.)? If the target of the link doesn't exist, the link should be more or less dead. I generally wouldn't bother disavowing. It's a bit situational, though - I'm not sure if you're working to disavow thousands of links and this is a large-scale problem or if there's just this one like or handful you're worried about. If you've got a handful of spammy links that all point to dead pages, I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
-
I thought the OP was talking about having the spammy site remove the backlink which would be a little counter productive in my experience dealing with these sites admins, as opposed to disavowing that external spammy backlink.
EDIT: Here is a more recent clarification and semi-official word from google on how to use the disavow tool: it's not a surgical knife with ricing coating, it's a disavow tool... use it like a "machete"
but i guess if he meant removal of his own 404 url on his back-end, it would be wise to 301 them instead, especially if they do have other quality and non-spammy backlinks. But, I would still disavow a spammy 3rd party backlink anyway. no harm in doing that.
-
The link recovery campaign mentioned above is probably called for and I second that a spammy link pointing to a 404 is not a good reason to disavow. Avoid the tool if at all possible.
-
Probably less important for the Spammy link, but there would be a decent chance you have other links pointing to the same broken pages which would be worthy of the 301 redirect. I'm a pretty big fan of not Disavow'ing unless absolutely necessary, it's a tad overused in my opinion.
-
Even though it is linkingEither that, or use the now good ol disavow tool on Google webmaster tools, far faster and easier imho.
I would remove them or disavow them immediately.
But it would be good to wait and hear from more seasoned folks (10+ years) who lurk in the dark around here often...
edit: I would say use disavow tool with caution and ENSURE 100% that the backlink source is spammy and low quality and sure to be caught in googles net sooner or later. but i do believe in proactively taking care of this issue to a good extent rather than waiting and seeing the damage rolling out. this can also be based on the total number of followed links that you have, on a small scale, it becomes more of an important task compared to when you have thousands or tens of thousands of links.
However. just to make it clear how bad this can be if left ignored, one of our niche clients has a total of no more than 400 backlinks so far and their direct local competitor has some 60,000 plus. and is a few years senior of a domain based on existence history. yet with us proactively taking care of low quality sites that we find constantly, we have been able to raise their DA and so far reach and tie with the bigger local competitor.
a good portion of those 60000 backlinks are spammy and in need of being removed by manual request or disavow. and i bet quite a few of them end up on old and expired 404s, but the effect cannot be more obvious when these issues are not taken care of on time.
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 links: How do I find keywords that are not linked to a URL?
Hi Moz members I'd really like to place an internal link of every instance of an important keyword phrase "cycling caps" or "cycling cap" to my eComm category page
Link Building | | andystorey
https://www.prendas.co.uk/collections/headwear/cotton-caps I feel this would not only help my customers browsing my store, but I believe it will help from an SEO perspective. How can I search my site using Moz, Screaming Frog, Google etc to find every time cycling cap(s) is used but is not linked to the above URL? I can then apply the same for cycling jerseys, socks, etc Andy0 -
What is the best way to remove a link that redirects to a spammy site?
I've got a new client and I'm trying to clean up their backlinks. There are several links that all redirect to this spam site http://www.expert-lender.com. All of the websites appear to be real, i.e. http://www.sammorganhomes.com/ but the actual links i.e http://www.sammorganhomes.com/wp-fav/backup/supplement/semitruckleasing.html are in a sub-directory and redirect to the spam site. I don't know if these links were from the previous SEO company or if they paid someone to create these or if these sites have been hacked. Can anyone tell me what is going on here and what should I tell these site owners?
Link Building | | Total-Design-Shop0 -
Why am I getting links in my link report from sites that no longer exist?
So, I have a link report from Link Detox. And I'm going through all of them and considering what sites need to be removed. and trying to find emails and contact webmasters. There is just one odd thing i'm starting to see more of. A lot of links are on websites or webpages that no longer exist. The link no longer exists. Some of the domains are even available for purchase. Why are these links showing on the backlink report and are they really harming my website? Also, do I need to add these links into the disavow document that I will submit to Google?
Link Building | | lightwurx0 -
Has anyone been able to by pass charges to have links removed?
I am working on Google Reconsideration Request Process for a website and have been asked by a few links to pay a certain amount to have my link removed however, the links were placed without my knowledge is there any way to be able to get them to remove without having to pay especially since I did not ask to be linked anyway? Does anyone know if Google has a templete that has been used in the past that possibly works well to bypass charge due? Thanks!
Link Building | | JoshuaWarren0 -
How to remove back links from third party website??
Hi Guys, I checked my website back-links and found some bad links. Now i just want to remove links from third party website. I know two methods as mentioned below: Disallow bad links from Google Webmaster Contact to webmaster and remove them I tried both of the above methods but not get success.Is there any other method to solve this issue??
Link Building | | RuchiPardal0 -
Thoughts on using the disavow tool for removed links?
Our website has been penalized by Google for the past few months due to unnatural links. We have spent the past 2 months submitting link removal requests to the domain owners with success. However, the Google Webmaster Tools "links to site" has not updated the list. I understand that they update the list of links as they crawl the website, but it has been 6-8 weeks on a lot of them (mostly our biggest offenders). We attempted to send a reconsideration request anyways, hoping Google would see that even though it is still listed, the link isn't actually there. We received a response that it is still in violation, but I believe it is because the webmaster tools links have not updated and perhaps this is what they go off of. Would you recommend submitting these domains to the disavow tool even though our link has already been removed for the past 6-8 weeks? Or even just listing them with the "#" comment tag so they can see they had been removed? Or would you continue waiting for it to update? Of course, we would like the penalty removed as soon as possible and were concerned that the list hadn't removed these websites the past 6-8 weeks our link had been removed. Example: This domain shows we have 3,397 within this website. It was an affiliate that had this URL forwarding to our pages: http://www.binet.lv/go.pl?PID=49276714O2422 . This no longer forwards to our webpage and the affiliate has been expired, but the GWT still shows them at the top of the links list. I also noticed a lot of sites left the links up, but added the nofollow attribute. These are still coming up in the Links list and does not decipher between which do and do not have nofollow. Could the spammy sites with our links as nofollow still be hurting us? Thanks for any help and recommendations!
Link Building | | shopbloc0 -
Advetorial links
How do you scientifically value advertorial links. I have a site who is willing to buy advertorial in large online sites which will contain links. (I would prefer they invested in content on their own site). The DA on these sites is universally extremely strong. the PA of the examples I've seen is pretty low. The site has strong DA matching it's main competition and is performing pretty well in terms of ranking. Question: how do you value this kind of link in terms of the amount of £ the publications want to charge. Anybody have a formula or a logical process which would provide solid advice rather than don't infringe Google's T&C's which I've already mentioned to them. Any thoughts appreciated.
Link Building | | Shivvyt0 -
Remove links or change anchor text?
I am currently in the process of cleaning up the link profile for a website that has been hit by Penguin thanks to loads of links from free directories with exact match keyword anchor texts (about 200 root domains from total of 300 root domains). I was wondering whether it's best to remove these un-natrual keyword anchor text links altogether, or change the anchor texts to brand (domain name, domainname.com, www.domainname.com, http://www.domainname.com)? I am currently trying to remove these links but was thinking it would be quicker to get to a healthier link profile (in terms of brand/commercial anchor text split) by altering the anchor texts and not removing them. Some of these directories are the worst of the worst on the other hand. Also note that I'm only really getting about a 30% response rate from the owners of these directories. Any thoughts? Many thanks in advance.
Link Building | | ec9awp0