Link Detox and Link Removal
-
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools.
First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them.
In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March.
So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links.
It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google.
But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links?
I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can.
Thoughts?
-
Hi everyone,
I'm doing some bad link cleaning. And am following this nice guide: https://moz.com/blog/bad-backlink-analysis-using-moz-link-explorer
And there it says that "Because we aren't concerned with nofollow links, you will want to set the "follow" filter so that we only export followed links. "
So does it really mean that I don't have to worry about nofollow links, even though they would be spammy, or some weird stuff like drug perscription anchors which for sure won't help me? Or is it better to disavow those as well? (I would assume so).
-
You are totally correct, Adam I simply use DA as a guide line for whether or not the website, as a whole, is 'OK' - not as a definitive rule. You certainly can get a spammy link from a high DA website but I haven't found that to happen very often at all. I suppose I use it in the way that I used to use toolbar PR - not as a rule, but a guide line. Thank you for your insight. Again, you are totally correct, I should not have been so vague.
Cheers, and thumbs up
-
Billy gave you some good advice, but I disagree with him on one point. Domain authority doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether a link is dangerous or not. You can get a spammy link from a domain with high authority or a great link from a lower authority domain.
You want to get rid of links that Google will view as intended primarily to manipulate search rankings instead of providing value to the user.
Some factors to consider:
- Is the link from a page or site that is relevant to mine?
- Does the link make sense for / provide value to the user?
- Does the link use my target keyword(s) as anchor text? (Too many keyword anchor texts is a problem.)
- Is the link purchased?
- Is the link near or with spammy links?
- Is the link from a low quality directory, forum signature, blog comment,
- Is the link from a page of duplicate content?
Hope that helps!
-
I would suggest taking the time to go through them. Check the domain authority and the actual content on the exact page that links to your website. Suspicious does not necessarily mean that it is a bad link - although most of them probably will be. If the page that links to you has content that is relevant to what your website is about and if the linking website has decent domain authority, I would put that link in the 'keep' pile. Even if out of the 120 you only end up with 25 links that you keep, it could make a difference in the positive.
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
-
Effects of a bad link linking to a image
i am getting a lot of links from wallpapers sites.. One person has created 1000's of similar sites that are linking back to my images. My guess is images do not pass link value positive or negative. But I am not sure what the potential effects would be. Does anyone know who linking to images might effect SEO especially when there coming from horribly low quality auto generated sites.
Link Building | | KentH0 -
Back link from site with DA of 72 to a website domain. Clicking on the link redirects to our website not the attended one.
Hi,
Link Building | | JIMBO16
I've ran a back link check and discovered a good back link to a site which then gets redirected back to my company's website. I have a feeling that an old SEO agency has purchased a small website which has a decent link back from a relevant organisation with a high Domain authority and then redirects the domain to our website to get the link juice. What are your thought on this? Is this really bad practise and possibly damaging? Thanks, Jim0 -
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 -
How to decide which links to remove.
I manage the seo for a bunch of different websites. We currently have a problem with links from low quality sources.... way too many of them and then way too much exact match anchor text. We have a lot of sites that we basically linked together (blog network) and we are in the process of correcting this. We know we have a lot of links we need to remove and/or anchor text we need to rewrite. My question is how do I know which ones to remove and/or edit. I know that having some links from low quality sources isn't bad, or links from some other sites you own, or having some exact match anchor text. I know this isn't all bad, and some of it is expected but we have a LOT of this going on. So basically I need to make decisions on each and every link as to whether we want to keep it, edit the anchor text, nofollow it, or delete it. I'm just not sure of what the best action is that should to be taken for each link. Any help would be really appreciated. http://jesus.christ.org/ If you browse around on there you will see what I'm talking about with the low quality links, or if you run it through open site explorer you will really see what I mean 🙂 Thank you, I hope to get some responses soon.
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
Internal links
hey guys, these days should internal links within your site carry no-follow tags? or does it really matter? thanks!!
Link Building | | tm46150 -
Changing links
Hi guys i wanted you views on changing the anchor text of links. I have quality links coming in but with year terms such as 2012 in there, if i want to change them all to 2013 for example would it be badly seen by Google? I cant say i feel comfortable about doing it but they are my links and are related to our products. Any advice much appreciated.
Link Building | | pauledwards0