Cutting off the bad link juice
-
Hello,
I have noticed that there is plenty of old low quality links linking to many of the landing pages. I would like to cut them off and start again. Would it be ok to do the following?:
1. create new URLs (domain is quite string and new pages are ranking good and better than the affected old landing pages) and add the old content there
2. 302 redirect old landing pages to the new ones
3. put "no index" tag on the old URLs (maybe even "no index no follow"?)or it wouldn't work?
Thanks in advance
-
Hello all,
Thank you for your answers,
Oleg, I am not that keen on meta refresh, as it is poor user experience - apparently it needs to be about 10 sec, as shorter time G. may treat as 301. Wonder what is the shortest time I can use which will lose the link juice but wouldn't disturb my visitors.
Gagan, in regards to 301 redirecting the bad page to 404 page..isn't that easier just to make it 404 without redirect?
Mike, what do you think is the best solution to keep the traffic but cut off bad links to specific landing pages.
I will be testing 302 soon from old URL to new one. Wonder if I ALSO should put 404 on the old one...or maybe no index...or it doesn't matter? What are your thoughts?
-
Does it seems perfectly okay to make the site page (linked by spam links) to have 301 redirect to show 404 error page
As if its a CMS system where many other pages are linked through other subcategories too of the component, so the option of cutting down the bad page, which is hurt by low quality links is through 301 redirect to land to 404 error page. Will it diminish or rather make completely off the value of all spam links pointing to it and finally does not affect the site at all.
-
Upon further research, you are correct. A noindexed page is still crawled and indexed, just not in SERPs. So any links will still be followed and the page is still a part of the website. With this in mind, I think you should 404 the page and redirect via meta refresh after some time. Reach out to the webmaster's of the good links and ask them to change the new URL.
I still don't think a 302 is the way to go in this scenario. Ideally, you'd experiment with different options and see which produces the best results.
-
Personally I would go with Oleg's original suggestion: "If your rankings are being hurt by these links, I would move them to a new URL and 404 the old page. I would then go through the link profile for the old URLs. Find all the high quality links and contact the webmasters asking to change it to the new URLs."
-
Sure, But Oleg said, "If you noindex the page, G won't be able to access it and it will lose all its authority".
If in case the page loses all its authority - does it still will pass on the negative value to the domain or other pages due to low authority or spam backlinks pointing to it
If its true, then may be making the page cut off from site by marking it 404 is a better way !!
-
NoIndex won't cut the links. It will just remove the page from the SERPs. So you'll still be hit with the bad links to your site and organic traffic will be cut off.
-
Sure, thanks
Does it mean if we noindex it - can it be safely presumed that all the low quality links pointing to that url will be nullified and it will not have any negative effect to the site. I mean there wont be any need for making the page 404, if we still use that page as regular part of the site, like for filling forms etc.
Many thanks, once again for your detailed reply
-
So his goal is the have users redirect to the new page without having Google pass the link authority to the new URL.
If you noindex the page, G won't be able to access it and it will lose all its authority. But any user that visits the page will still be redirected to the new url. There is no such thing as a 404 redirect.
Meta refresh is another way to redirect users to a new page without passing authority. As long as the time is greater than 0 (meta refresh of time=0 is treated similar to a 301), it shouldn't pass authority. So same deal, noindex the page and set up a redirect for users, not bots.
-
Hello Oleg,
Am also interested in knowing more about it
Does marking a noindex, follow or noindex, nofollow to that page is a better way than 404 redirect ?
Also, i dint get you for meta refresh redirect. What does it mean like ?
-
302 by definition is "Temporary Redirect", which is not applicable here. According to this 302 experiment, 302's did actually pass some authority down (which may or may not hurt you). I do see the UX advantage to having the old URL redirect to the new page though.
Another alternative is to block the page via robots and set up a redirect or noindex the page and set a timed meta refresh redirect to the new page.
-
Thank you Oleg,
I have checked and have a few .gov.uk links going to some of those pages which generates some traffic, so not sure if 404 on them is the suitable in the situation.
On the other hand why 404 is better than 302? They both stop link juice passing but 302 passes the traffic.
-
If your rankings are being hurt by these links, I would move them to a new URL and 404 the old page. I would then go through the link profile for the old URLs. Find all the high quality links and contact the webmasters asking to change it to the new URLs.
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
-
Why Google not disavow some bad links
I have submitted bad links that I want to disavow on google with the Moz Pro hight spam score. Its almost 4 months completed yet I have a bad link that exists with high spam score any solution? https://fortniteskinsgenerator.net/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marktravis0 -
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Backlinks in Footer - The good, the bad, the ugly.
I tried adding onto a question already listed, however that question stayed where it was and didn't go anywhere close to somewhere others would see it, since it was from 2012. I have a competitor who is completely new, just popped onto the SERPs in December 2015. Now I've wondered how they jumped up so fast without really much in the way of user content. Upon researching them, I saw they have 200 backlinks but 160 of them are from their parent company, and of all places coming from the footer of their parent company. So they get all of the pages of that domain, as backlinks. Everything I've read has told me not to do this, it's going to harm the site bad if anything will discount the links. I'm in no way interested in doing what they did, even if it resulted in page 1 ( which it has done for them ), since I believe that it's only a matter of time, and once that time comes, it won't be a 3 month recovery, it might be worse. What do you all think? My question or discussion is why hasn't this site been penalized yet, will they be penalized and if not, why wouldn't they be? **What is the good, bad and ugly of backlinks in the footer: ** Good Bad Ugly
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Link Juice Inquiry
Hello, So I have a website (example.com). I have an ajax pop-up (example.com/#example) that I am receiving a bunch of links to. Since this pop-up (example.com/#example) is on my homepage, are these links giving juice to the homepage, or this pop-up, or both?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Site-wide links: Nofollow or eliminate altogether?
As a web developer, it's not uncommon for me to place a link in the footer of a website to give myself credit for the web design/development. I recently decided to go back and nofollow all these site-wide footer links, to avoid potentially looking spammy. I wanted to know if I should remove these links altogether, and just give myself text credit without a link at all? I would like for a potential client who is interested in my work to still be able to get to my site if they like my work - but I want to keep my link profile squeaky clean. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brad.s.knutson0 -
Bad links showing up in opensiteexplorer
Hello Everybody,I've been working as an inhouse SEO for nearly a year and a half now and i've gotten some pretty great results. Two years ago our site was on the second page for the most important keywords in our niche and with a lot of work we've managed to get top 5 rankings for most keywords and even the number 1 spot for the most important keywords. I've been using opensite explorer to track backlinks and today i noticed that a lot of links we're discovered in the last week from websites that i did not recognize. Most url's won't even load properly because each "blogpost" has over a thousand comments. It took me a couple of tries to even find one that loaded properly and find the link to our website, and it was really there. There haven't been any drops in our rankings but i'm worried about a possible spam penalty. I know that i can use the disavow tool to at least disavow the links from these domains, but is that really the only thing i can do? Furthermore these are just the links that opensiteexplorer picked up, who knows how many more are out there.For any of you questioning wether or not i did this to myself, I'm no saint, but I'm definitely not stupid enough to buy these kinds of links. any help would be highly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Laurensvda0 -
How do you remove unwanted links, built by your previous SEO company?
We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clairerichards0 -
How Can I Check Competitors Linking Profile?
If I'm looking for weak points in my competitors linking structure, how can I use Open Site Explorer to do that? In other words, I'm not sure how to use Open Site Explorer? Zane
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Springboks0