Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does blocking domains help remove bad links?
-
I have affiliate websites that are harming for one of 2 reasons:
1. They are on adult websites (and I don't want to be in a bad neighborhood)
or
2. They are using a Frameset (so their content appears identical to mine and I am getting "credit" for all their junk links)
I cannot get these websites to remove our links so I have blocked their IPs on our production firewall.
Is this an effective method or should I do something else with these links?
-
You could try to block the URL in robots.txt like Sanket says below, but at the end of the day, the link's still pointing to your website and therefore Google will still see it. If I'm not mistaken, Bing has launched their disavow tool already (Ref: http://www.serperture.com/blog/link-building/disavow-link-tool-block-bad-incoming-links), so perhaps you should at least start there?
-
Hi,
You have blocked their IPs but it is not a perfect solution because blocking site in your servers can stop generating back links data. Google gets your links form that adult site. so try to contact the administrator of that site for removing your link. For that you can get contact details from Whois.com and send request mail that site for removing your link.
If you get unnatural link mail from Google about this site then you can put website's name in reconsideration request so that website is no longer in Google index, Google has removed that website from search and its also not showing in your GWT backlinks profile.
-
thanks Chris - was about to answer that as well.
So nothing really that can be done until the disavow tool is developed?
-
David, SaraSEO states, "I cannot get these websites to remove our links" above, so I would say that she has tried that to no avail, unfortunately.
-
As above, until Google release a disavow link tool, the only way to remove a link is to have it removed from the linking website. Have you tried contacting the sites directly?
-
Hi SaraSEO,
If I've understood correctly, you have backlinks to your website that you would like to have removed as they're harming your domain's authority. If that's the case, then the best thing you can do is Google about Google's disavow tool and list the domains as unwanted.
Unfortunately negative SEO is a topic that's been discussed in great detail and there are many opinions, but listing these bad domains as unwanted is a wise move. Blocking the IP addresses on your production firewall, isn't going to stop Google from seeing the association unfortunately.
Hope that helps!
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
-
My site is linked from over 900 "The Globe"-domains - disavow or not?
Hi! As some of you may be familiar with, there is a giant spam-network with the same design and same page title on all domains: "The Globe - The world's most visited web pages". For example: theglobe.at
Link Building | | Sindre
theglobe.co.za
www.internet-search.us I've now discovered that over 900 of these spam-domains link to my site. My plan was of course to disavow them all, but Google is explicit on telling me to be careful. «Only disavow if you are certain that the links are damaging to your rankings». And to be honest, I'm not sure. Also: it seems drastic to disavow almost a thousand pages. I'm afraid to mess something up. What would you do?3 -
What impact does multiple links from the same c-block have on SEO?
Recently there's been a move made in my company to only allow backlinks from websites on different c-block IP addresses. The most links we have from one c-block is 15. There is a wide variety of other IP addresses linking to our site as well. My question is - do we need to be so restrictive with using websites from the same c-block as long as the neighbourhood is good and we're not linking sites with full identical IPs (matching d-block as well)?
Link Building | | LawMarketingYLF0 -
Does an external link to an image file on my site help my SEO?
I found a few websites that are displaying images from my site. Curiously, they have also linked these images to the source image file on my website. I found these because Moz showed these sites in my list of backlinks. I assume that means it impacts my Domain Authority. But does this actually help me in search engines since it's not linking to a page on my site?
Link Building | | AlexLenhoff0 -
Do you need a place to ditch bad links?
This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.
Link Building | | Matt_Wilson0 -
Are Link Exchange A Bad Idea
Hi, i am wondering if link exchanges are a bad idea. I have seen a company called link market where you join and exchange links with other companies and i am just wondering if this is now a bad idea. The last thing i do not want to happen is for google to get angry if i done link exchanges
Link Building | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Text Link vs image link?
Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Helpful or Hurtfull / Distributor Links to Our site on every product page?
We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5... We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process. I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us. Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.
Link Building | | donford0 -
Link Directories - Good or bad?
I've just done a search on open site explorer for a competitors site that has is ranked number one. Most of their highest authority backlinks are from link directories. I just read an article on here saying to stay away from directories that state things like 'seo friendly directory'. Many of my competitors links are from these kind of sites! Will it harm me to get links from such sites? It seems to be working for my competitors.... confused.com!
Link Building | | SamCUK0