I have well over 110 identical backlinks of widely varying quality - is it worth taking the page they're linking to down?
-
The site on which I'm working has been experiencing a month-to-month decline since the Panda and Penguin updates - I didn't get an unnatural links notification, but have clearly fallen off the face of Google with many of the more important rankings. After running a scan on my backlinks, I found over 110 identical backlinks (it looks like the same medical definition and my website is listed in the endnotes as a source - just the URL, not anchor text), some from reputable websites with high pageranks and others that look very 'spammy.'
We've redesigned the architecture of the site, so the actual link itself has a 301 redirect on it, but I'm just wondering exactly how much of a liability is it to have these links out there? I'm guessing it's an all or nothing kind of thing given the identical content on each page - on one hand, I'm pretty frantic to get to the root of the Google penalties and get back in their good graces. On the other hand, I don't want to kill the site completely by going after a set of valuable links.
Has anyone dealt with this before?
-
Hi again,
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The links being from identical content should not be harmful to you - this sort of citation is fairly common, e.g. when a site has shared a piece of viral content like a video, infographic, tool (calculator etc.) or cited case study that others reproduce and link back to. I'd be far more concerned about the quality of the linking sites.
I think the duplication question will also be even less of an issue if you remove the poor-quality links: identical citations from high-quality sources will pass as normal and not malicious liking activity.
-
Hi Jane,
Thanks for the response.
I'm familiar with the process of asking for link takedowns and for going through the disavowal process - the main thing I'm asking is whether or not having **identical **links is harmful - the pagerank for several of the linking sites is quite high, the backlink itself is an endnote to what looks to be a repeating set of glossaries about a medical procedure... many other backlinks are completely unambiguous about whether or not they should be removed altogether, but I'm looking for a bit of clarification as to whether or not it's ok to have that many identical links in terms of google's hamfisted approach to penalizing.
Thanks
-
Hi John,
This is not an uncommon problem - have you tried contacting any of the spammy sites and requesting the links be taken down? Link take-downs are also very common nowadays and are a good way of both culling undesirable links and gathering "evidence" that you have tried to clean things up if you need to send a reconsideration request to Google.
If the request to take down the link comes from an official company email address, and you follow up within ~10 days to sites you get no response from, link removal requests can be quite successful. Granted, there will be some sites you cannot contact or who don't get back to you (and some will ask for money to take the link down - it's up to you if the price they ask for is worth it). If you are truly dealing with penalties, removing links is a lot more effective than other options.
One other option is to "disavow" the bad links through Webmaster Tools - more information on link disavowal is available here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
We have always found, however, that actually removing the links is most effective, and that disavowal is a good tool for when you can't remove some of the links.
Cheers,
Jane
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
-
Adding Quality Backlinks
Without sounding like an idiot, what are the best ways in adding good quality back links. There are websites out there such as Click Submit but from experience they just link from weird URL's and the links are in comments. In an ideal world starting up my own Blogs and building up a good domain authority would work best but the customer would like some back links adding by next week. Using local directories wouldn't really work for their business so if anyone has any idea's I would love to hear them.
Link Building | | chrissmithps0 -
What is good quality link?
Recently we did some job for our friend who promised us link from his page for to ours. His page is very well ranking for key word we try to rank as well and has good authority. What would be a good link for our website to get from his in order to help us to rank better but still did not steel his traffic? Thank you
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
Usin Strong Inner Pages To Pass Link Juice?
Hello, Is this a common practice? Using the Open Site Explorer I can see all of my sites strongest pages. Would it be ok for me to build other pages but putting links on these stong pages? Thank YOu!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Header and Footer Links on Home and other catelog pages of site
Hello, in our site www.mycarhelpline.com - we have just reworked on header and footer links. Have removed lost of unncessary footer links. However, the header links on extreme top right side has some links like - login, register, about us, partner with us etc. Is is that google will give importance to these links and i rather should move them to footer links of page and should move the most important anchor links on the top header. Pl suggest
Link Building | | Modi0 -
Any value in link building to local pages on my site?
If I'm trying to rank for the term 'wedding band' with my url: http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands will linking to local pages such as: http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-bands/wedding-bands-london help the main page to rank? I added the 'local' pages to try and pick up any traffic from long tail search queries but my main focus is on getting the main page to rank as the traffic from long tail queries is so small. So is it worth me spending time building links to these local pages in order to try and help the main page rank?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Tagged pages showing too many links
I'm confused - seo moz crawl shows I have lots of pages with too many links. 150 - 200 or so. I'm not sure how any of my pages can have that many links and they don't appear to to me. Here's an example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/tag/wedding-entertainment They all appear to be 'tag' pages. These pages are blocked by meta robots anyway so is this a problem and how do I fix it? I also am very confused by rel canonical. I have 300 odd pages with this warning. Is this good or bad? Plesae help!
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Link Analysis Quality Issues / Concerns?
I'm currently using OSE to find out where some of my competitors are getting links. The intention is to find new link opportunities. What i'm finding is A LOT of directories. It seems like for every 1 good link opportunity I'm getting 9 directories. These directories are easy links, but my main worry is quality. Should I be obtaining these links or skip over them?
Link Building | | Hyrule0 -
Nofollow link from page rank 7?
What do you think about a nofollow link from page rank 7? will I see any results? how much is it worth?
Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0