Link profile clean up
-
Hello everyone,
we are actively working on cleaning the backlink profile of some of our sites. But I am confused on what needs to be done. Now it's possible to find some toxic or deadly domain where our site has been linked from without our approval, but if we remove all those sites, and may be all the site that have a poor domain authority and/or no PR rank (< 1), our profile will look too clean don't you think? . My questions are :
-
If we over clean our profile are we not manipulating our links, so Google will not like it?
-
Is a natural profile will not be a mix of all those domains (poor and good quality)?
We are trying to see what to keep or try to get deleted/disavow, so we could try to claim some of our lost ranking back
Thanks for your help on this,
Cheers,
Mounir
-
-
Good questions; do you think you're under penalty now? If not, just work on cleaning up the future of your "link building" efforts rather than trying to go in reverse and fix things. A few answers to your questions:
- No, Google will not penalize you for having a profile that is "too clean."
- Google doesn't care if you "manipulate" your link profile. They care if you've built links to manipulate their ranking system. Anchor text is one big sign that you're attempting to increase your rankings for certain terms.
- Google is pretty good at targeting links you've built to increase rankings. The links that will hurt you are those you've built - not the junky links that everyone acquires over time. The only exception might be a spam attack from a competitor, but that's rare and another issue altogether.
If you've built highly-targeted links, take those down. Don't waste your time taking down low-quality links that other people build to you. If you think links you haven't built are harming you, double-check WMT for a penalty and make sure there's no overly-targeted anchor text stemming from your own efforts.
-
"Manipulation" to me suggests that you are wondering if you'll receive some sort of penalty for the search engines only keeping good links and removing bad links. A basic answer is "no" but I would recommend a strategy that would protect you in the event that you somehow got a penalty.
If you are e-mailing webmasters and the like, I would set up a separate gmail account and only use this account for your link removal process. In the event you receive a manual penalty from Google, you can share the details of this account with them to let them know your process. You'll have e-mails that prove your efforts and if you use Google spreadsheets to notate your efforts also, you'll do yourself a huge favor when trying to explain your reasoning for removing all the links. In the spreadsheet, you could have all the links you are trying to remove in one column, the contact dates in successive columns and a column at the end that notate removal date of the link from the webmaster. If you keep this all in the same Gmail account, you'll be able to share the account details with Google in the event of a manual penalty.
That being said, I don't think you'll have a manual penalty issue. The issue I could see is a algorithmic penalty that would come about via the over optimization of the left over links. For the links you are keeping and the links you build going forward, I would recommend using a good mix of anchor text and start to focus more on your brand name. You can use opensiteexplorer.org to download your anchor text and use a pivot table to see the anchor text diversity. I'm sure there are tools out there that will automatically give it to you but I pretty much only use OSE.
I hope this helps
-
@vzPro
Thanks for the feedback, but after anlysis it seems that we have a lot of "unwanted" links, even one from a porn site
I feel that it should be a mix of both world, cleaning + going after good quality links. But I am just not sure how google sees that , as I said if we managed to get rid of all bad links and keep only the good ones is it not some kind of manipulation ?
Thanks again for your feedback though
Cheers,
Mounir
-
Personal Opinion --> Unless you've been it by Google's algorithms, your time is much much much much better served trying to gain quality, authority, relevant links then "cleaning up" old ones.
Unless your links are all exact match anchor text, I wouldn't worry about them. If they are, you could help yourself by asking the sites to link to you differently with a diverse range of anchor text.
All in all, cleaning up takes just as much time as getting new, high quality, highly relevant links. It's all about time management.
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
-
Spammy links
Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
Linking Between Sites
Hi everyone, Hope you are all doing well. If a company owns several different websites that are supposed to be different brands but are part of the same niche/sector is it OK to link between them? Or would this be seen as violation? Thanks
Link Building | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Indirect Link Earning via dofollow Links In News Articles
Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus. I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute. Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords: http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/ Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort. However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here: http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/ Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS. If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page. To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page. Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Link Building | | bionewstx2 -
Reciprocol Links
Am I correct in stating that linking to every article about your company is a bad idea. I see a lot of sites with followed links to the articles that link to them. Is this not devaluing the link? I've been recommending removing the links or no indexing the page and no following the links. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Link Building | | brandonschultz0 -
Does the ratio of external nofollow links to external "do follow" links matter in terms of SERPs ranking?
My site has an external link nofollow:dofollow ratio of approximately 1:1 That is, there are about as many nofollow external links as "do follow" external links. I have an impression that the ratio of no-follow to "do follow" links is a factor in the way that our website shows up in SERPs. I have the impression from reading a variety of sources, and from looking at Seomoz, that calculate "trust" factors as if they mattered (in SERPs), that seem to value a relatively low nofollow:dofollow ratio. Am I correct about that? Thanks,
Link Building | | tcolling
Tim PS - I don't know whether or not this matters, but our website is at: www.trustworthycare.com - Tim0 -
Linking strategy between my own sites
Hi, I have one main site, let's call it food.com I also have 10 smaller sites, let's call them mexicanfood.com, indianfood.com, italianfood.com etc food.com is on its own separate dedicated server the 10 smaller sites are all on a shared IP in hostgator I don't want Google to think that I have created the 10 sites for only purpose of creating links to each other. So, would you recommend that all those 10 sites link to each other? or should there be no interlinking within those 10 same IP domains? What about linking from those 10 sites to my main site? How should I structure my own backlinks not to get penalized by Google ?
Link Building | | limens0 -
Too many external links vs linking root domains - good or bad?
Hi guys, After the latest Linkscape update, we noticed that our website have 424,671 external links with 4,395 linking root domains, so roughly 100 links/domain. Does Google consider this to be a negative thing or we do not need to worry about it. Many thanks. David
Link Building | | sssrpm0