Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?
-
If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't. Is there any reason to remove them? If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.
-
Links that have been discounted do indeed factor into penalties. In fact, they're probably the links you want to remove FIRST because these are sites/pages that Google has already flagged. You should absolutely remove them, especially if you're under penalty of some sort.
Removing links is indeed a bit of a two-edged sword in that you often cut out some spam links that Google doesn't (yet) know about. That said, leaving the links in place is the poorer option in my view, as it prevents you from moving forward with a long-term strategy.
If all of your links are manipulative, it might be better just to start a new site rather than cleaning up to return to 0.
-
Again this issue has come up. Anyone with any insight into this:
-
If he has little-to-no natural, high authority links, changing to a new domain may be a better move.
-
Once again, it all comes down to "do you have real, natural, high quality links pointing to your site?" If you only have a couple, it may be easier to move domains and contact those link owners to point to new url. If you have many good links that would improve rankings, it may be easier to remove/disavow the bad links instead of getting all those links changed to point to new location.
-
Is it a bad idea for him to move the content to a new domain and be more careful about the links he acquires?
-
Thank you for the response. However, it's not what I'm looking for. I agree with the process my have mentioned for having penalty removed. However, I'm asking about this specific penalty:
Unnatural Links - Partial Match - affecting some links.
If Google has already discounted these links and my rankings dropped as a result. Is there any benefit to hiring a company for $1,000 to identify which links need to go and than pay $ per link to have them removed. Finally putting the rest in a disavow file and sending it into Google.
Say they do remove the "penalty" would it do any good. Did they discount the links AND hit my site with a penalty or did they just discount the links rendering having the "penalty" removed pointless.
-
Hi Beastrip,
In our opinion it wont make much difference for quit a while, however a ship shape website is what we should all strive for, and what Google likes most. If you were to put the hours of labor into correcting this issue the return on investment will disappoint you. So you should never let the problem get that bad, where you are being penalized in the first place. A clean ship will be handsomely rewarded, one that is in disrepair and neglected will not reach the same results, and will struggle to regain what it could have had if well maintained.
-
You should attempt to remove them and add them to disavow list. Then in the RR, mention what you've done to fix the penalty.
If your rankings are based mostly on the manipulated links, your rankings will drop hard (which is most often the case). Once the penalty is removed though, start working on obtaining natural links so you can return to ranking. If the page/domain has no natural links, it may be easier to just start fresh.
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Can Google Bot View Links on a Wix Page?
Hi, The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code. Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page? Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable? Thank you SO much for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
Using "nofollow" internally can help with crawl budget?
Hello everyone. I was reading this article on semrush.com, published the last year, and I'd like to know your thoughts about it: https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-google-crawl-relnofollow-at-all/ Is that really the case? I thought that Google crawls and "follows" nofollowed tagged links even though doesn't pass any PR to the destination link. If instead Google really doesn't crawl internal links tagged as "nofollow", can that really help with crawl budget?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Unnatural Inbound Links Warning in GWT
Hi all, A bit of a long questions so apologies in advance but please bear with me... My client has received an 'Unnatural Inbound Links' warning and it is now my task to try and resolve through a process of; Highlighting the unnatural links Requesting that the links be removed (via webmaster requests) Possibly using the Disavow Tool Submitting a Reconsideration Request So I downloaded my clients link profile from both OSE and GWT in CSV format and compared - the amount of links returned was considerably more in GWT than it was in OSE...? So I set about going through the links, first filtering into order so that I could see blocks of links from the same URL - I highlighted in colours; Red - Definitely need to be removed Orange - Suspect, need to investigate further Yellow - Seem to be ok but may revisit Green - Happy with the link, no further action So to my question which relates to, is it 'black & white' - is it a case of 'good link v 'bad link' or could there be some middle ground? (am I making this process even more confusing than it actually is?) As an example, here are some 'Orange' URL's; http://www.24searchengines.com/ (not exact URL as it goes to the travel section which is my clients niche) - this to me looks spammy and I would normally 'paint it red' and look to remove, however, when I go to the 'contact us' page; (http://www.24searchengines.com/texis/open/allthru?area=contactus) and follow the link to remove from directory, it takes me here; http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/help/update.html DMOZ??? My clients has a 'whole heap' of these type of links; http://www.25searchengines.com/ http://www.26searchengines.com/ http://www.27searchengines.com/ http://www.28searchengines.com/ ...and many many more!! Here is another example; http://foodys.eu/ http://foodys.eu/2007/01/04/the-smoke-ring-bbq-community/ ...plus many more... My client is in the 'cruise niche' and as there is a 'cruise' section on the site I'm not sure whether this constitutes a good, bad or indifferent link! Finally, prior to me working with this client (1 month) they moved their site from a .co.uk to a .com domain and redirected all links from the .co.uk to the .com (according to GWT, over 16k have been redirected) - a lot of these 'spammy' links were to the .co.uk and have thus been redirected, should I even consider removing the redirection or will that have severe consequences? Apologies for the long (long) post, I know I'm heading in the right direction but some assurance wouldn't go amiss! 🙂 Many thanks Andy <colgroup><col width="1317"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing
| |0 -
How to avoid too many "On Page Links"?
Hi everyone I don't seem to be able to keep big G off my back, even though I do not engage in any black hat or excessive optimization practices. Due to another unpleasant heavy SERP "fluctuation" I am in investigation mode yet again and want to take a closer look at one of the warnings within the SEOmoz dashboard, which is "Too many on page links". Looking at my statistics this is clearly the case. I wonder how you can even avoid that at times. I have a lot of information on my homepage that links out to subpages. I get the feeling that even the links within the roll-over menus (or dropdown) are counted. Of course, in that case then you will end up with a crazy amount of on page links. What about blog-like news entries on your homepage that link to other pages as well? And not to forget the links that result from the tags underneath a post? What am I trying to get at? Well, do you feel that a bad website template may cause this issue i.e. are the links from roll-over menus counted as links on the homepage even though they are not directly visible? I am not sure how to cut down on the issue as the sidebar modules are present on every page and thus up the links count wherever you are on the site. On another note, I've seen plenty of homepages with excessive information and links going out, would they be suffering from the search engines' hammer too? How do you manage the too many on page links issue? Many thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hermski0 -
Disavow tool removed all our links from webmaster tools
We recently used the Google Disavow tool to remove 200 bad links but Google has nearly removed all our links from webmaster tools from over 2000+ we only have 150 now! Has anyone had the same problem? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webdesigncwd0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
How can scraper sites be successful post Panda?
I read this article on SEJ: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/scrapers-and-the-panda-update/34192/ And, I'm a bit confused as to how a scraper site can be successful post Panda? Didn't panda specifically target sites that have duplicate content & shouldn't scraper sites actually be suffering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0