Unnatural Links Removal - are GWMT links enough?
-
Hi,
When working on unnatural links penalty, is removing and disavowing links shown on the GWMT enough or should the list be broaden to include OSE and Majestic etc.?
Thanks
-
Hi BeytzNet,
The answer to that question really depends on another question:
Are you looking for a short-term solution that may or may not get your current penalty lifted, or are you genuinely interested in dealing with links that really shouldn't be there?
If you're after the band-aid solution then you can try going with the arrogant suggestion from some Googlers that only links which offend Google at this point in time need to be dealt with. (Given Google's current propensity for adding to its list of what is "unnatural", their attitude borders on sadistic.)
If you really want to get some control over your backlink profile and future proof your site in the face of changing spam targets, impending Penguin updates and whatever else may be coming down the line, you might find it useful to try this little exercise:
Download backlink data from as many of the following as possible (free download limits for the tools you don't subscribe to will give you enough of a sample)
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Open Site Explorer
- Majestic SEO
- ahrefs
- Raven Tools (pulls in data from Open Site Explorer & Majestic SEO)
Open each csv, select all and change text color so that the data for each list is a different color.
Copy and paste the content of each into one Excel spreadsheet so that all of the URLs are in one list.
Deduplicate the list.
Check out the different colored URLs left in your list...the takeaway is that every tool will bring you different link data. If you want a true picture of your backlink profile, you are now much closer to having it.
Incidentally, Google is not the only search engine to apply manual penalties. Others just don't talk about it as much as Google does. You might also find it helpful to read this post from Ryan Kent about identifying the source of your link penalty.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I don't usually worry about removing/disavowing those links. Google is concerned about the links that you have personally made (or an SEO on your behalf) in order to increase pagerank.
It's pretty common to have a lot of them.
-
Thanks Marie,
Question -
Going through my link profile I have encountered dozens of links from different SEO sites that analyzed my domain - whether on its own or showing it as a competitor to another site on the same niche.Weirdly, these are dofollow links (dozens!).
Should I disavow them?
Obviously these are not requested links of any kind. These sites are kind of aggregation sites that show practically any site worth mentioning.
-
Thanks Ben. This is the article I remember seeing.
-
That's great information and process.
-
Thanks Ben for that article. A few days ago I was searching for that and couldn't find it!
The vast majority of SEOs will tell you that you need to include links from as many sources as possible. However, John Mueller (a Google employee) recently said that in the majority of cases, focusing on the links in your WMT is enough. I could not find the thread where he said this, so I asked in WMF if someone could find it. Here is the thread.
In the past I have used a combo of links from WMT and also from ahrefs. However, for the current sites that I am working on I am just using WMT. If for some reason we do not get reconsidered then I will go back and add links from other sources.
I think the reason why people say to get links from all sources is that historically WMT has only given you a sample of your links. But in the last few months or so, in the "Download latest links" section they give a much larger number. Don't be fooled by the fact that it says, "Latest links". I have seen sites where this list included thousands of links going back as far as 2008.
-
According to Google Search Quality engineer, Uli Lutz, you only need to include the links in GWMT. Here is an article with more information on that.
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
-
Did Google Ignore My Links?
Hello, I'm a little new to SEO, but I recently was featured (around 2 yrs ago) on some MAJOR tech blogs. For some reason however, my links aren't getting picked up for over 2 years - not even in MOZ, or other link checker services. - By now I should have had amazing boost from this natural building, but not sure what happened? This was completely white hat and natural links. The links were after the article was created though, would this effect things? - Please let me know if you have any advice! - Maybe I need to ping these some how or something? - Are these worthless? Thanks so much for your help! Here's some samples of the links that were naturally given to http://VaultFeed.com http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/09/13/microsoft-posts-cringe-worthy-windows-phone-video-ads-mocking-apple/ http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/15/4733176/microsoft-says-pulled-iphone-parody-ads-were-off-the-mark http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/microsoft_mocks_apple_in_vids_it_quickly_pulls/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2420710/Microsoft-forced-delete-cringe-worthy-spoof-videos-mocking-new-range-iPhones.html And a LOT more... Not sure if these links will never be valid, or maybe I'm doing something completely wrong? - Is there any way for Google to recognize these now, and then they'll be seen by MOZ and other sites too? I've done a LOT of searching and there's no definitive advice I've seen for links that were added after the URL was first indexed by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DByers0 -
Pop up question and link flow?
Does a pop up like the one on this site www stressfreeprint co uk (top left corner about us, who we are) count as an external link or would link juice not flow to it. I like to have a few pages that i don't want to waste link juice on but would still like to have them and hope this is the answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Links not removed
Hello, I want some help regarding Bad links, I have Uploaded Disavow links, webmaster tools before 4-5 months But still, They are showing in Back links to my Site & Not disavow, can any one Help For this ? why they still appears in backlinks to my site, Why not removed Still ? Thanx in Advance, Falguni
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sanjayth0 -
Manual Removal Request Versus Automated Request to Remove Bad Links
Our site has several hundred toxic links. We would prefer that the webmaster remove them rather than submitting a disavow file to Google. Are we better off writing web masters over and over again to get the links removed? If someone is monitoring the removal and keeps writing the web masters will this ultimately get better results than using some automated program like LinkDetox to process the requests? Or is this the type of request that will be ignored no matter what we do and how we ask? I am willing to invest in the manual labor, but only if there is some chance of a favorable outcome. Does anyone have experience with this? Basically how to get the highest compliance rate for link removal requests? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
A friend was hit with a manual penalty for unnatural links-impacts links. (see attached) I'm thinking it may be because they copied their entire wordpress.com site over to site.org/blog. (without redirecting it, so they have duplicate content as well) Out of 76+k links, nearly 11,000 are from their wordpress.com blog. If that's the case is the problem solved by upgrading within wordpress.com to redirect to site.org/blog? (then making a reconsideration request?) Or do I risk negatively affecting their site somehow? They saw a significant increase in traffic when they moved the content over but I'm thinking that was more a matter of increasing content on their site than increasing backlinks. The .org site ranks relatively well, whereas the wordpress.com blog doesn't really rank at all.Worth noting: it's a partial match, not a sitewide match. Does that negate my theory about the wordpress.com blog being the cause in any way? Since many of the links from it are sitewide? The wordpress.com blog has a header link to the .org homepage, plus individual links to it in posts. There are also three links in the header to pages on their .com website which redirects to three corresponding pages on the main .org site (the whole .com redirects). There are 23 footer links from the blog to the targeted .org pages as well. In the attached screenshot of who links most from Google Webmaster Tools, note that martindale.com links most, but it's a lawyer's site so they naturally have referring content there. Could that be a problem?Thanks everyone! 🙂M8JVEI6.jpg?1 M6gYE90.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Link Reclimation & Redirects
Hello, I'm in the middle of a link reclamation project wherein we're identifying broken links, links pointing to dupe content etc. I found a forgotten co-brand which is effectively dupe content across 8 sub-domains, some of which have a significant number of links (200+ linking domains | 2k+ in-bound links). Question for the group is what's the optimal redirect option? Option 1: set 301 and maintain 1:1 URL mapping will pass all equity to applicable PLPs and theoretically improve rank for related keyword(s). requires a bit more configuration time and will likely have small effect on rank given links are widely distributed across URLs. Option 2: set 301 to redirect all requests to the associated sub-domain e.g. foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page1.html and foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page2 both redirect to foo.mybrand.com/ will accumulate all equity at the sub-domain level which theoretically will be roughly distributed throughout underlying pages and will limit risk of penalty to that sub-domain. Option 3: set 301 to redirect all requests to our homepage. easiest to configure & maintain, will accumulate the maximum equity on a priority page which should positively affect domain authority. run risk of being penalized for accumulating links en mass, risk penalty for spammy links on our primary sub-domain www, won't pass keyword specific equity to applicable pages. To be clear, I've done an initial scrub of anchor text and there were no signs of spam. I'm leaning towards #3, but interested in others perspectives. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCampolo
Stefan0 -
Removing pages from index
Hello, I run an e-commerce website. I just realized that Google has "pagination" pages in the index which should not be there. In fact, I have no idea how they got there. For example, www.mydomain.com/category-name.asp?page=3434532
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexGop
There are hundreds of these pages in the index. There are no links to these pages on the website, so I am assuming someone is trying to ruin my rankings by linking to the pages that do not exist. The page content displays category information with no products. I realize that its a flaw in design, and I am working on fixing it (301 none existent pages). Meanwhile, I am not sure if I should request removal of these pages. If so, what is the best way to request bulk removal. Also, should I 301, 404 or 410 these pages? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Alex0 -
Link Juice - Lots of Pages
I have a site, PricesPrices.com where I'm steadily building inbound links and pagerank. I have about 4600 pages on the site, most of which are baby products in the baby gear sector. There are many outdated items that aren't really my focus, but do pop up in long-tail search queries from time to time. My question is a pretty basic one. Theoretically if a site has say 28/100 link juice, then as you go deeper and deeper into the site, the link juice is divided more and more. My question: Is this really true or just a concept? My thoughts are to hide many of the products that i don't really need to focus on therefor passing more link juice to the products that remain, but I also don't want to that if it won't necessarily make the remaining pages rank higher or have more link juice. I also have to keep in mind the merchandising aspect of the site and providing a good user experience. If i only have 300 products on the site, there will be a ton of unhappy people who can't find the products they are looking for. Any thoughts and/or pointers in the direction of funneling that pagerank down into my site would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modparent0