Remove comments or leave them be?
-
We're finding a lot of comments that were posted by a previous company - they've been using a keyword as the comment name (UGH) and then the comments are usually generic, like "great information, will definitely be back to read more form you" - you guys know what I mean...
Now, this site is ranking well and so are the keywords. My question is, should we work on removing those comments or just leave them be and now moving forward, use the proper process - since we are doing this ourselves now.
-
If the site is doing well, avoid panicking - lots of webmasters freak out and go on a rampage trying to remove every link, when they should just sit back and relax. If we're talking thousands and thousands of junk comments, it's something you might want to be concerned about. If it's a lower number, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it and would focus on building quality backlinks going forward. Contacting blog owners is a nightmarish task because the sort who have blogs that auto-approve junk comments are usually not the most tech-savvy and often don't even think to include their contact info anywhere. Lots of them don't own their own domain, so you can't get their whois info that way either. If it were me, I'd put my time and energy into building good, diverse backlinks rather than spending tons of time trying to remove these links that don't seem to have negatively affected you.
-
To further confirm your feelings I completly agree with this answer. Wait until the penalty comes and then be proactive. In the meantime build high quality links.
-
No, this site is doing very well, the site and the keywords. Our mistake was having this particular seo company help us with link building.
Thank you for your reply, much appreciated.
-
Thank you so much for confirming what I was feeling Just needed to hear it from another in the field. I appreciate your time, thank you for responding.
-
If a keyword is ranking for poor quality content..then it's not a keyword worth having.
So for this reason, I would remove the comments. If they haven't already been picked up by Google's Panda update, then expect it to happen shortly.
Even if you take a hit with rankings for these keywords, it's better disposing of the generic comments now, rather than them having a negative impact on your whole site in the future,
-
I think it's a very pertinent question and I think you need to be realistic about the time it would take to outreach to the webmasters about your comments and then how likely they are to be removed.
The answer to me would be "a long time" and "not very likely" - which would essentially be a waste of time considering that you could be building better links during that period.
It might make you feel a bit uncomfortable, but I'd ignore them until you get an unnatural links message - at which point, I'd outreach and get ready to disavow (so you could make a note of which comments you think might trigger this, those on unrelated sites with a lot of outbound links for instance). Until then, I'd spend your time more wisely by optimising your site and building better links. There is also evidence to suggest that Google might be going down the route of devaluing links on the fly, which may happen to you in the future (or may have already happens). Should it occur and you see a rankings drop (but nothing too serious and no link warning message), it's important to have a number of high quality links built or ready to be built to replace those links devalued.
That's where I'd spend my time.
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
-
Should I get comment removed?
I left a comment on a site's blog post maybe 2 months or so ago. Yes, that blog has DoFollow comments on. It turns out that site uses one of those sidebar featured comment widgets, and has a crazy amount of duplicate pages due to an unruly wordpress install, pagination and attachments indexed. Well, I checked my google analytics recently and it shows that I'm getting 652 links from that site. Ahh.. Should I ask the blogger to remove my comment? Or should I let it go, and wait until google reindexes that site? My links don't technically show on all those pages anymore because since that time, the blogger has gotten more comments that are now featured instead of mine.
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
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 -
External Backlinks - Should I remove/disavow external blog posts done by SEO company?
Last year my company hired an SEO company to build backlinks for targeted achor text keywords. It turns out that they wrote average to below average blog posts that had content related to my business, but that were placed on odd websites, not related to my business. They did this for about one year before I fired them. Should I try to get each of those blog posts removed and then disavow them? If the external links back to my site are nofollow then it is my understanding that I don't really need to worry about them...is that accurate? Is it too risky to keep any external backlinked content alive when it is on a site that is unrelated to my business?
Link Building | | ajgrossman0 -
Toxic Link Removal-Better to Pay an SEO Firm or Can I Do It Myself?
Hi Jen: Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. They are of the opinion that it is imperative to remove the toxic domains. The fee for toxic link removal is about $3,000.I would prefer to save the $3,000 but would prefer not to take the risk of screwing up my ranking if this is a complex procedure best left to SEO professionals. My assumption is that link removal will involve identifying the toxic domains, requesting removal and eventually submitting a Google disavow request. Can I do this myself or is there a big risk of screwing it up? Assuming it is safe for me to remove toxic links, would anyone suggest software of tools for doing so? Thanks so much.
Link Building | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Removing a link to a 404 page
Hi guys, If I found a low quality or spam link pointing to my site, but the link points to a 404, 500, etc (inaccessible, error page), Should I bother asking him to remove the link? Thanks
Link Building | | WizardOfMoz0 -
What impact do no follow links in blog comments have if any?
Hi I think we all agree that social network sites such as pintrest/instagram/twitter are all now no follow however I believe there is benefit in having them.... So I wondered if anyone had been experimenting with commenting on blogs which had no follow attributes and if there was any benefit in terms of improving your rankings?
Link Building | | RankStealer0 -
Blog Commenting good or bad?
I spend a good amount of time on SEO forums and I found a thread about building links within comments.. I personally don't see how putting my keyword in my name place and linking it to my site will benefit me, I feel like google is already on to this and no one is going to click on it. Is this a waste of time?
Link Building | | SEODinosaur1 -
Removal of "bad" incoming links
I have had my site registered for a long time (since January 1995) and in that time we have built a good number of incoming links. We have a vendor database that we expose as a service to our visitors, which numbers around 5,500. These sites vary dramatically from low-end, Mom-and-Pop type web sites (some ugly in the extreme :)) to nationwide, established vendors. Back in the day, we had the basic tactic to request a link to our site if the vendor wanted to be listed in our vendor database. We stopped that practice years ago but still have many sites linking to us. The quality of some of these sites is very poor. I want to come up with a strategy for dealing with these. To that end, some questions: How "costly", from an SEO perspective, is a poor quality site that links to our site? What metric(s) should be used to assess the quality of sites linking to us? If possible, for the aforementioned metric is there a "bar" we might try to hit? For example, would it be useful to request removal of links where <metric>is less than x? What is x?</metric> Given that we have thousands to assess, is there any report I can create to identify these sites? Is it generally preferred to have vendors link simply to our home page or is it more effectice to have them link to particular pages on our site (each vendor can generally be associated with a "topic" on our site). In short, I am willing to go through this process if there is real value in it. Thanks. Mark
Link Building | | MarkWill0