Can You 301 Unwanted Links to Another Site?
-
I am trying to clean up my link profile, and have noticed that a I have a lot of crappy inbound links linking to some of my old pages. And those old pages have since been 301'ed to current pages.
My question is, is it worth trying to 301 those old pages, and thus those crappy links, to another website?
Would this do anything to clean up my link profile?
-
If you really would want to do something about it, I would say that you will be better off returning 404's, as it is less likely for those bad links to carry any (bad) weight if they point to non-existing pages then it is to establish a relationship between websites by 301'ing.
This assumes that you will 301 the old pages to a website not owned by you, as I don't think you would want bad links to one of your other websites. And because if you 301 the old pages to a domain not owned by you, in effect you are establishing a relationship with a total stranger who may do any number of bad things on its own, which in effect could harm you later.
But if it was up to me, I wouldn't do anything about those bad links. Just try to get new links of better quality and they will very soon outweigh the bad ones. Also, it is quite natural for any kind of website to have low quality links, so IMHO there really is no need to do anything about those old ones, just build better new ones.
-
Interesting, The only problem I can see with this is if anybody that is looking for your site will be redirected to the spam site. You might end up with a Branding issue.
Example. Say you have a children's site that sells clothes and toys. Now the spam site is an adult site. If you redirect to that site, your potential clients can be turned off to your brand.
Yes, this is an extreme case but non the less you need to determine if you are getting legit customers from your old pages that are being redirected to your new pages.
You can also just create a report and send it to Google via Google Webmaster tools. They can devalue those links and see that you are genuinely attempting to have a legit link profile.
-
HAAH!!! I love your question. I don't know what the consequences would be, but do what you have to do. 301 them back to the source, Google or your competitor.
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
-
Can't get my site recognised for keyword
My site prettycool.co.uk and primary we sell fascinators, the problem is I can't get the word fascinators to be listed by Google. We are on the 1st page for most colours ie. pink fascinators, blue fascinators etc. but for the term fascinators even if we fetch we are listed for a couple of hours and then disappear. I've checked for keyword stuffing but our site sell fascinators and we need to have this word in our site and other sites have a lot more references to the term and are listed on the 1st or 2nd pages. We used to be listed on page 1 for many years but the last 2 or 3 years dropped back to page 4 but now nothing. Any help or suggestions would be fantastic!
Technical SEO | | Rutts0 -
How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?
When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Can I 301 Re-Direct within the same site?
I have a magento site and would like to do a 301 redirect from page A to page B. Page B was created after Page A but contains the same products. I want page A to be replaced in the search engines with page B while carrying the link juice from page A. Is this possible? Am I better off just blocking page A through the robots .txt file? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Can I remove 301 redirects after some time?
Hello, We have an very large number of 301 redirects on our site and would like to find a way to remove some of them. Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B? How about any links that go to A? Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time? Thank you for you you help!
Technical SEO | | Veva0 -
Linking Domains in Open Site Explorer Report No Longer Exist. Help.
Hello to all, I have a number of Linking Domains on our Open Site Explorer Report that no longer exist. I've run URL checks on just a sample of the list, and found that approx. 35% of that sample are from now dead Linking Domains. Can someone help? If these Linking Domains are defunct, how can I remove these? Does Google reflect negatively on these dead Linking Domains in our SERPs? Has anyone experienced this before? What action did you take?
Technical SEO | | -Al-0 -
I have 404 errors but can't find where these links are?
The 4xx report had 0 errors, and then on the recent crawl it found over 200. They are all variations on real URLs e.g.: Real URL: http://www.bullseyeuk.com/10-up-deluxe-literature-holder.html 404 Error URL: http://www.bullseyeuk.com/10-up-deluxe-literature-holder.html �� None of them are linked to the root domain and I can't find where they are coming from. Any ideas? Thanks Jack
Technical SEO | | JackMurphy0 -
I have been Hit with UNWANTED Links and I need to know how to remove them?
I have been looking at Google Webmasters Tools and saw that suddenly I have this huge amount of links form an unknown source “SiteLoki” never heard of it? Didn’t want it! Need to get rid of it!
Technical SEO | | rdominey
My Website www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com experienced a sudden and dramatic loss of presence on Google about three weeks ago. I first thought it was something to do with the new Google Algorithm. I also contacted Google to be re-evaluated. They replied:
Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions foundMay 10, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality Team I have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
There was another post regarding canonical tag issues; resolved, I removed all canonical tags for now. Today I discovered the links and I suspect that having even
1 link for this website will penalize you in Google. Here are some Webmaster Tools pages for reference: I also noted that the image for the link is from an old site hosted on www.Globat.com. I don't know what that significance might be. I left them in January. Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can offer, Ray Webmaster-Tools-Query_Your-Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photos-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki_links.jpg0 -
Can leaving up old web pages no longer accessible through my site navigation hurt my rankings?
My firm recently overhauled a client's website. As part of the project, we gave the content a new structure, eliminating certain pages and creating several new ones. However, I just found out that some of the "old" pages (the ones we supposedly eliminated) still appear in the Google SERPs. Somehow, the client - who handled the coding - let these pages remain live even though they can no longer be accessed through the site navigation. This seems like something that could hurt the client's SEO rankings, but I want to make sure before contacting the client and suggesting they take down the old pages. Can anyone confirm my suspicion?
Technical SEO | | matt-145670