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
-
Block Links From Spam sites
can you block links from other websites?ie: links backlinking to your site, causing a high spam score.
Link Building | | Socialdom0 -
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 -
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 -
Asking a site to remove a "nofollow" on a link to our client
Hello, We created a good infographic for a client of ours and a large tech site (DA 86) picked up and ran a story on it. We didn't contact this company asking them to feature it, they have just picked it up through other shares around the Web. I understand that, at the end of the day, it's their prerogative whether to "nofollow" their links or not, but surely they should be giving our client some credit as they have clearly deemed the graphic newsworthy and felt that it would appeal to their readership. I've emailed said tech site, but to no avail. Does anyone have any advice on this? Or is it just a case of they can do what the heck they want? I know that our client will still benefit from the additional referral traffic, but a follow link would have been nicer! Cheers, Lewis
Link Building | | PeaSoupDigital1 -
Drop in Rankings After Removing Links
So I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
1000 of links on my website ? is it good or bad
Hi guys my site: www.dorchdanola-netbutik.dk is a e-commerce store, and generally we have many links on all pages because of the many products and categories. Im not sure if this is actually bad or good? I've been told that it will definately harm my site when google crawls it. The thing is that google visit my site often and I still have good pageranks in google. So does it actually harm my site having all these products and categories? And what can I do about it if google see every page as duplicate content? I also link to my social pages like FB, G+, e.g. Should I put rel="nofollow" or rel="me" on these social links? Thanks guys!
Link Building | | Dorchdanola0 -
How can I find all the outbound links from a website domain?
I want to find all the outbound links (basically whatever comes in <a>tag) from a domain (say www.abc.com) as well as all the subdomains under it (say abc.com/a etc). Open Site Explorer provides the inbound links from a website but does not provide any functionality to get all the outbound links from a website. Is it possible to do?</a> <a>Thanks in advance. Deepak Jain</a>
Link Building | | Deepak_Jain0 -
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