Removing thousands of shady backlinks?

[JKorolenko]

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

[JKorolenko]

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.

[NakulGoyal]

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.

[Morningside]

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

[MarieHaynes]

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!

[Marcus_Miller]

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.

1. Removeem
2. Rmoov
3. 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