Our site has too many backlinks! How can we do a bad backlink audit?
-
Webmaster Tools is saying we have close to 24 million links to our site. The site has been around since the mid 90s and has accumulated all these links since.
We also have our own network of sites that have links in their templates to our main site. I'm fighting to get these links "nofollow"'d but upper management seems scared to alter this practice.
This past year we've found our rankings have dropped significantly and suspect it's due to some spammy backlinks or being penalized for doing an accidental link scheme network.
24 million links is too many to check manually for using the disavow tool and it seems that bulk services out there to check backlinks can't even come close.
What's an SEO to do?
-
How many domains do those 24 million links come from? It's possible you could find that they distill down into a manageable number of domains to manually review. I think that tools like Link Detox can help in an initial review of links and perhaps you can use that as a first pass to find as many spammy ones as possible. Then, I would take all of the links that were marked as suspicious or healthy, and visit one link from each domain manually.
In my experience, the only sites that I am seeing recovering from link based issues (either manual penalty or Penguin) are ones who have been EXTREMELY thorough on their audits. It sure is a lot more work to evaluate links by hand but I think it is necessary.
-
Thanks, we'll check it out. Have you had any experience using this tool?
-
I was afraid of an answer like this
Thanks for the tips. Are you aware of any database or list of spam sites I could easily run our backlinks through to cut down the list?
-
Agreed. It's been a company practice to do these types of links for years but with penguin/panda, I'm afraid it's only hurting us.
It's a tough case to change these links. They do bring traffic to the site so I'm hoping a nofollow is good enough.
Thanks for your input.
-
Try using Link Detox
-
Going along with Rob L.'s question, what about spammy keyword links on one of your SUBDOMAINS? Ie, news.domain.com? Will this hinder your rankings as well?
Back in the pre-penguin days we created poor content loaded with keyword links in blog.domain.com and news.domain.com. I don't use them anymore and thinking I just blow up those subdomains.
Thoughts?
-
We also have our own network of sites that have links in their templates to our main site. I'm fighting to get these links "nofollow"'d but upper management seems scared to alter this practice.
This past year we've found our rankings have dropped significantly and suspect it's due to some spammy backlinks or being penalized for doing an accidental link scheme network.
Those spammy backlinks might be the ones from your own network of sites? I hope that they don't have money terms as anchor text and are in a big block in the footer? If they do then upper management might want to reconsider in an effort to get your traffic back.
-
Use spreadsheets and other tools like OSE and Majestic and dig in. Roll up your sleeves and get after it. I wouldn't start with Webmaster tools, it's not the best, but whatever you do export your reports to excel and start narrowing 'em down.
Remove domains you know are good or search for domains you know are bad, etc.
Filter search in OSE to remove nofollows and internal links.. There are things you can do to narrow this down but it will be a daunting task, no question.
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
-
Is this campaign of spammy links to non-existent pages damaging my site?
My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content. Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs. I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing. Questions: 1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task. 2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better? 3. Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question. Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarkHodson0 -
We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?
Hello, We have a series of sites and one, in particular, has around 75,000 (20%) monthly users from the USA, but we don't currently offer them anything as our site is aimed at the UK market. The site is a .com and though we own the .co.uk the .com is the primary domain. We have had a lot of success moving other sites to have the .co.uk as the primary domain for UK traffic. However, in this case, we want to keep both the UK traffic and the US traffic and if we split it into two sites, only one can win right? What could do? It would be cool to have a US version of our site but without affecting traffic too much. On the other sites, we simply did 301 redirects from the .com page to the corresponding .co.uk page. Any ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AllAboutGroup0 -
Red Square SEO Backlinking Service. Does Anyone Have Any FeedBack On Them?
Ive done quite a bit of research and I'm strongly considering using a back linking service to speed up my rankings. The one I found to be the best is Red Square SEO, do any of you guys have any feedback on them? Heres their website. http://www.redsquareseo.net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Voltron0 -
WP Datar site shady linking to my site
Hello, I have done some research on this but cannot find a solid answer to my question. After recently reviewing my "not found" errors in webmaster tools, I see that a site called "WP Datar" has linked to a number of our pages that actually do not exist. I am wondering first, if this will harm our site, and second, what is the best way to get those links from their site taken down? I tried emailing, but of course, the email address listed on the site did not work. 🙂 Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lfrazer0 -
WordPress Plugin Backlink?
When developing a WordPress plugin, is it OK to include a dofollow backlink with the name of the source site as the anchor text? Or would Google consider this spammy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JABacchetta0 -
Inbound Links Inquiry for a New Site
For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
How Does This Site Get Away With It?
The following site is huge in the movie trailer industry: http://bit.ly/18B6tF It ranks #3 in Google for "Movie Trailers" and has high rankings for multiple other major keywords in the industry. Here's the thing; virtually all of their movie trailer pages contain copy/pasted content from other sites. The movie trailer descriptions are the ones given by the movie companies and therefor the same content is on thousands of websites/blogs. We all know Google hates duplicate content at the moment... so how does this site get a away with it? Does it's root-domain authority keep it up there?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | superlordme0 -
One Blog Comment Now on Many Pages of The Same Domain
My question is I blog commented on this site http://blogirature.com/2012/07/01/half-of-200-signals-in-googles-ranking-algorithm-revealed/#comment-272 under the name "Peter Rota". For some reason the recent comments is a site wide link so, bascially my link from my website is pretty much on each page of their site now. I also noticed that the anchor text for each one of my links says "Peter Rota". This is my concern will google think its spammy if im on a lot of pages on a same site for one blog comment, and will I be penailzied for the exact same anchor text on each page? If this is the case what could I do in trying to get the links removed? thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0