Removing thousands of shady backlinks?
-
Hey guys,
We've been hired to redesign a website that has thousands of backlinks created by a (possibly) shady offshore company, and I'm wondering if anyone out there has experience dealing with a deletion of this size and type. Is it as simple as just disavowing the whole lot?
Thanks,
Jason
-
The site is ranking well and was not affected from Penguin. However, we believe the amount of bad backlinks (ranging from hundreds to thousands) will hurt the site's ranking soon. Our client has yet to receive any manual warning from Google as well.
-
Jason
You have some great detailed answers from Marie and Marcus. I guess the question I'd like to ask is, Why are you looking into this ? Did you get to a point where your site is not ranking as well before ? Or is it that you got an actual un-natural links warning ?
That could help justify what the next steps should be.
-
Marie:
Sorry, but I couldn't resist responding to this one. It's not the answer that's confusing, it's the situation. I like to compare modern SEO to fixing Macs (what I did in my previous lifetime). Sometimes you have to get out the goat entrails and burn the incense.
Sometimes there isn't an easy answer. Strangely enough on my site (which I inherited 3 months ago), the "bad" links don't seem to have really damaged it, as we have a Domain Authority of 63. Go figure.
Jim
-
The answer depends on whether or not the site has a manual penalty against it. If there is a message in WMT of unnatural links then it won't be enough to just disavow. You've got to go through a whole process of trying to manually remove links and reporting your efforts to Google and then disavowing the rest.
If you want to simply have those backlinks nofollowed then disavowing the whole lot will do the trick.
However, be careful if you're disavowing all of the links. I have seen cases where people went disavowing links willy nilly and did more harm than good. If the plan is to simply start over with a clean slate then go ahead and disavow. The problem is that these links will still be present in your backlink profile whether you use OSE, ahrefs, majestic or even WMT. They will simply be treated as nofollowed by Google.
But if you are trying to save some of the existing rankings then whether or not you disavow can be a complicated decision.
For example, the links could be shady, but if the site hasn't been affected by Penguin then you may not have to remove them. Some of them could actually be helping. Remember, Penguin is an algorithm and doesn't catch EVERYTHING.
Or, for another example, if the site has been affected by Penguin for certain keywords then you may not be able to rank for those keywords until you get rid of Penguin. But here's the problem - no one really knows with certainty how to do that. Some SEOs will tell you that disavowing all your links will clear it. Some will tell you that Penguin has already disavowed all of your links and all you need to do is get some good links. There are very few (if any) case studies that really show a site what to do.
How's that for a confusing answer? LOL!
-
Hey Jason
In a word, no, no way that simple. Google are simply not going to process that disavow unless they see you (or your client) have made a considerable effort in the removal of those links. In all likelyhood, it will take a good few months and some considerable effort to show that you have gone to lengths enough to satisfy them.
There are a bunch of tools that can help, but ultimately, there is still a lot of manual work involved in any clean up.
Few pointers.
Tools worth bothering with.
- Removeem
- Rmoov
- Link Detox
None of these will do the job for you and in all likelihood, you will want to use all three. Beyond that, if there is a redesign you can 404 old pages on the other site to kill inbound links but if most of your shady links are pointing at the homepage, there is not a lot you can do about them other than clean up and attempt a disavow.
You are going to have to document the whole process from putting together a list of candidate links for removal & collecting email addresses through to every removal request. I would also suggest possibly going beyond just the email and looking at phone numbers, letters and anything else you can do to show the level of effort required.
Depending on the history and any penalties you are going to want to submit your disavow and a reconsideration request detailing all of your tireless and persistant efforts.
In summary, it's not terribly hard or complicated, but there is just a whole bunch of work involved to do the job properly and to a level that Google is going to be happy with and don't expect results over night. My advice would be to brief your client that a honest clean up could take up to three months and three reinclusion requests along with a considerable investment in man hours to do the job properly.
This is a good job for an intern or apprentice. Well, let me rephrase that, it's a good job to give to an intern or apprentice, it's likely going to be quite a sucky job for them to have to do but baptism of fire and all!
Hope that helps!
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
-
How to remove spammy backlink from my webpage?
Hi Professionals, Someone create spammy backlinks in my website. How to remove spammy backlinks from my community "Sewways" company website? Please guide me to solve my this problem, because my website is D-Rank according to that backlinks. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Smartlanjabdul0 -
A large number of high spam links are negatively affecting my DA, how do I remove them?
I have identified a large number of very high spam score links to "free wallpaper" coming into my site.
Technical SEO | | beckygh
I am running a wordpress blog and would like some advice on the best course of action. There are thousands of spam domains linking to various images on my site with the anchor text "get free high quality hd wallpaper" The webmasters for these domains are not contactable so I am planning to submit a disavow file to google. I am aware these links have negatively affected my DA so would like to do more to remove them. My questions are: will deleting the images they link to help?
As this is on a wordpress site deleting the images will result in a soft 404, should I force a hard 404 to properly break the link?
Will this positively improve my DA?1 -
Should existing canonical tags be removed where a 301 redirect is the preferred option?
Hi, I'm working on a site that is currently using canonical tags to deal with www and non-www variations. My recommendation is to setup 301 redirects to deal with this issue instead. However, is it ok to leave the existing canonical tags in place alongside the new 301 redirects or should they be removed? My thoughts are that this is not a canonical issue and therefore they should be removed? If 301 redirects are not possible it would be better have them that nothing at all but I don't think we need both, right? Any feedback much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | MVIreland0 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
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. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Link removal from search rank checking sites
I'm going through the link removal process for unnatural links to a site. While I'm able to identify the obvious link profile and seo-article links that Google wants removed, what should we do about the links that are generated by the various seo link investigation and ranking services? Example: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze/allamericanfencing.com This site (seoprofiler) automatically creates these links to web sites when it generates its reports. Are those links that need to be removed or disavowed, or will Google not care? I want to err on the side of caution, but don't know how to treat these types of pages. The site didn't ask for or lobby for those links, so it's "natural" in that sense, but they're not editorially earned either (except for happen to be ranking for a similar term). Does anyone have experience on this aspect of the unnatural link grooming process?
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK. Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM. Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
Technical SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy1 -
Spam links on my Backlink Profile
Recently after checking my backlink profile, my site has attracted quite a few spam backlinks with the anchor text written in Asian characters. We don't do any black-hat tactics and have remained clean in our process, as well as not submitted our site to any spam directories, yet we still have these foreign links. Any thoughts on how to get rid of these or stop these from occurring?
Technical SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
Leaving Comments on blogs when html is removed
I found the following blog. It is pagerank 5 do follow http://www.unssc.org/web1/programmes/rcs/cca_undaf_training_material/teamrcs/forumdetail.asp?ID=32 If you attempt to leave a comment with html, the html is removed. There is a button which allows you to leave a comment but if you do it gets redirected to the domain of the blog not your site. However there are still people leaving links with the url of the intended site. As late as today. look at this comment
Technical SEO | | mickey11
Comment posted by : Alex on 09/09/2011 I love to se percorsi on this site very often How is this done, if anyone knows I got the code done to this your keywords The important part being mce_real_href0