How do I go about removing low authority, crappy, backlinks?
-
How do I go about getting rubbish backlinks on a clients websites removed? The links were created by a previous companies link building campaign, and I believe this (along with a few other things) could be the reason for their poor SERP's as they are an established website.
Can I alert Google and get them to discredit the links, or do I manually have to try to make contact with the owners/webmasters of the websites to get the links removed?
All help appreciated!
Thanks
-
Last time this happened, I identified the SEO agency, got some advice from a specialist lawyer, and then issued a take-down request in the strongest terms (though with bad backlinks being replaced with good backlinks). It worked.
-
Justin,
I'd also like to suggest that instead of trying to get the low quality links removed, it will be a better option to try and obtain higher quality links.
Manoj
-
Hi Justin, I take it that you've not had any other signs that you've been penalised. You've not received any warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools or had the clients pages vanish from the search results completely? They still have pages in the index?
You mention that you're trying to recover from a previous companies link-building activity. How much information do you have to work with?
Do you have any historic ranking reports? Do you know how the rankings have changed and when? Can you find out what the position was before they started their link building and how it's changed over time?
Can you establish how badly your client has been affected? Do you have access to the site's analytics? Can you see/quantify any sudden loss of search traffic etc?
Personally I'd start by taking a good look at the SERPS for the chosen keywords and seeing how strongly your clients pages are likely going to compete.
In your view, with a cynical SEO eye, do the pages deserve to rank higher than the competition?
How would your client react if you put their page and a competitors ranking page side by site and asked them to say honestly which one was best? (I don't recommend that you do this unless you know how they'll respond!!)
-
Hi Caroline. My guess would be that they're not being directly penalised, but are suffering because their inbound links are coming from what Google sees as low ranking, low-quality, low value-add sites such as, but not always, content farms etc.
If you suspect this to be the case it's really important to look beyond the headline "linking root domains" number and look at the domain/page authority of those linking domains.
If you were trying to differentiate good content from bad - would you look at the number of votes, or the number of votes from respected sources? (Espectially when you know that people are trying to game the system by building lots of "easy" low quality links.)
This is of course just my opinion. I'd love to know if there any evidence for actually "link penalties".
-
@doug
Thanks for the quick answer, I think that @caroline's point/question is also of main concern. I am happy to leave the links as long as I can dilute their (potentially negative) effects by gaining quality, authority links, but I would expect from the first Panda update, that backlinks from link farms/directories would carry no authority and therefore would have little to no effect on the website that they were linking to.
-
Doug could I ask you a question?
I've noticed that in the last few months people have attributed their decrease in the rankings to 'being penalised for bad links'.
It is the case that they were previously gaining benefits from those links and that with the recent changes these links go back to 0 influence, reducing their rankings to what they previously were, as opposed to the links having a negative impact on their sites?
-
You won't get Google to do anything about them, but Google have said that "crappy backlinks" won't hurt you, they just won't be worth much anything.
(Backlinks obtained in an underhand unethical manner might though...)
If you really want to get the links removed you'd need to contact the individual webmasters. This is likely to take lots of time/effort that you're almost certainly better off spending doing some high-quality link building or content creation.
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
-
Lost Search Ranking - how to fix spammy backlinks
I have a health niche website ( grocare.com ) Recently I subscribed to ahrefs and moz and found out so many spammy backlinks to my site (which i didn't create). Someone told me this is a common competitor tactic. To create bad links for your website to drank it. My question is - in ahrefs now, there are a LOT of spammy anchors and it seems more backlinks are being created by spammy websites automatically. I have lost many rankings because of this. I tried diluting by creating more normal anchors but it doesnt seem to be working. How do I fix this ? Any help is apprecciated xVrvj1q
Competitive Research | | grocare2 -
Competitor Ranks Top Keywords Without Backlinks
One of my competitors is ranking very well for many different competitive keywords (1k+ searches per month). I'm trying to figure out how in the world he is ranking so well. I've signed up for MozPro and looked at his back-links. He has 1 branded site-wide back-link from a decent blog. He also has 1 contextual back-link from a decent blog. Other than these 2 back-links, the rest are garbage links unlikely to even count for anything (he has maybe 12 of these low quality back-links). My website on the other hand has more than 15 back-links from different (high quality) websites and does not rank anywhere near this competitor. This leads me to believe that either MozPro back-link reporting is inadequate or there is foul-play on the part of my competitor. As far as on-page SEO is considered, his website is far inferior. Therefore, I highly doubt this would play a role. What are some reasonable approaches I can take to better understand the cause of this discrepancy. Clearly the back-link reporting has not revealed any answers.
Competitive Research | | poke10 -
History of Page or Domain Authority...how?
Hi everyone, is there a way (tools) to see the "history" of any given website in terms of Page or Domain Authority? Like if I went to Alexa and typed in www.angieslist.com it tells me the site ranks #**2,691 **Globally and #670 in the USA. But, is there a way to see how the rank has gone up over time, or where it was a year, two or more ago? Thanks
Competitive Research | | co.mc0 -
Determining why an established competitor's rankings have bombed - What's the best way to go about it?
I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages. I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too. **What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? ** I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No? Thanks guys
Competitive Research | | Martin_S0 -
How does TTH have only 220 Domain Backlinks?
Was looking at these guys today http://www.tentonhammer.com/ One of the orginal games websites, an authority in its niche and 7 years old (about as long as that niche has existed) Its all unique, high quality content but it has a only 220 linking domains, including BBC etc It doesnt make any sense to me that this website should have so few linking domains. Anyone have a thought as to whats going on here? S
Competitive Research | | firstconversion0 -
What % is a GO when using the Keyword difficulty tool?
Hi, A lot of keywords I have looked into say 'moderately competitive' at around 35% - 45%. But what else would you look at in the table to decide whether or not the keyword term is achievable and how do you decide this maybe its the root domain backlinks and maybe you would only touch it if it had less then 30. Basically what other elements do you look at when deciding whether to pursue? This might also include some research in Google itself (although most the data you would want is in the tool, well I think anyway! Cheers
Competitive Research | | activitysuper0 -
How to find all the backlinks of a website?
Hello, I would like to know if there is a tool or a way to find all the backlinks of a website in order to understand how this site does get traffic? Thanks, JD
Competitive Research | | sarenausa0 -
Why are links not being added to my Domain Authority
I have just compared my domain authority with competitors and I can see that they are outscoring me on links from YouTube etc. Even though I have same set-up with regard YouTube and Squidoo etc and am also featured on Dmoz... these are not being added to my domain authority. Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | manedog0