What is the best way to remove and fight back backlink spam?
-
Removing low quality and spam backlinks. What is the most effective clean-up process?
-
Hey Matti
Glad it helped buddy. Check out those tools, they won't do the job for you but they will certainly help out with some of the manual labour aspects.
Marcus
-
thank you for the response Marcus. so far it's not really that bad. I discovered that there were some pretty bizarre links that facilitated the atrophy of our rankings but not quite reach 90% spam links.Starting a new domain is far more than I think. I'll probably look at the tools that you suggested and see what's out there then.
Regards,
Matti
-
Hey Matti
In a nutshell, if it is really bad, then start again on a new domain.
What I am seeing with a few people I am helping is that where the site has had historical results, but is now penalised, attempting to clean up if the back link profile is pretty rotten (90% + placed links) is a pretty tough gig.
There are some tools out there that are proving useful and the pick of the bunch would be:
- rmoov
- Link Cleanup and Contact
- Remove’em
These all have pros and cons so you will likely want to use all of them.
Additionally, you will want to make sure the site is worth saving and likely invest some time and effort in generating some honest links through some solid content marketing. Maybe build some kind of free report or something specific to the site that you can use to do some outreach based link building. Do some blogging, invest some time and effort in the quality of the site.
Additionally, if you have a penalty, be prepared to put in a few requests and if you intend to disavow, be thorough.
With some experience here, you also have to ask yourself - what are you trying to save? If the answer to that question is that you are trying to save some spam links that still seem to be working at the moment, then, seriously, start again.
Without a link and some research it is hard to make a call but know this, it is a tough job to remove bad links and unless you have a link profile where there is something worth saving, then a new domain is likely the fastest way to sort out this mess and make sure you don't get hit again when they tighten up the link penalties down the road (you know it's going to happen).
There really is no generic answer here and every situation is different but be sure to know what you are getting yourself into before you undertake this and do an honest review of the site, the content and the links to make sure this is a battle you can win.
This is a good read:
http://cyrusshepard.com/penalty-lifted/
Hope that helps buddy
Marcus
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
-
Best & easiest way to 301 redirect on IIS
Hi all, What is the best and easiest way to 301 redirect URLs on IIS server? I got access to the FTP and WordPress back office, but no access to the server admin. Is there an easy way to create 301 redirect without having to always annoy the tech in charge of the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 2MSens0 -
Are There Negatives to Removing the Rich Snippet Date
On some of our website's pages, Google displays the date of the last update in the search results. We want to remove this because it cuts off our meta description and it can make our page look outdated. Are there any negative consequences that you can think of when removing the date rich snippet.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Best Practices to Choosing a Domain Name
I have the following list of domains to choose from: http://www.xxx.net/ http://www.xxx.uk/ www.es-xxx.com Which of these domain structures seem the best, or are all 3 questionable?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Site links show spam
Hi folks, I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al. I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware. I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
301 help, whats the best way
Hi all right now i have 301 redirects setup in my htaccess file i recently redesigned our site so i have been redirecting all the old urls to the new ones. I saw a post about having all your urls the same format, so i updated my htaccess file to redirect all urls from http://www.mysite.com/food to http://www.mysite.com/food/ (added a forward slash). Now on my latest seo crawl i see all my site urls, redirecting to the forward slash url. am i doing this right, thanks will
Technical SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
404 handling the right way
Hi, Currently when a page is not found I make a 301 redirect to a 404 page should I really do a redirect or maybe a rewrite of the 404 page without redirection? Thanks, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Removing Duplicate Pages
Hi everyone. I'm sure this falls under novice seo question. But how do i remove duplicate pages from my site. I have not created the pages per say. Their may be a an internal link on a page that links to the page causing the duplication. Do i remove the internal link here is a sample of a duplicate page http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fabout%2fticket-industry-news.aspx http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fhome.aspx&CntPageID=1 I know the url is way too long. working on it Thanks for your feedbacks.
Technical SEO | | ticketplatform0