Backlinks from non-relevant site
-
There's a forum I used to participate in that allows you to include a link to your website in your signature block. I have over 500 posts in the forum so that provides a lot of backlinks to my website.
However, I recently decided to remove my website link from my signature for two reasons:
-
The forum is 95-99% dead. Hardly anyone uses it anymore. BTW, the website that houses the forum is still popular within is niche (articles, etc). Just the forum appears to be dead.
-
The website and its forum really have no connection whatsoever to my business. I'm in a completely different niche.
However, I have no idea if I've made the right decision. Will removing my signature and the backlinks hurt my site? Or will it help it since the other site really isn't related to mine?
Thanks for any thoughts on this!
-
-
Thanks Travis, that's exactly what I wanted to know! The links are definitely gone from my forum posts so I assumed it was a crawl issue but wasn't 100% sure. Thanks again for all your help!!!
-
I really don't know how that forum handles sigs, so I can't say for certain. What you can do is check a handful of your old posts at random, if the sig is gone - the links are gone.
The problem with all link data, even Google Webmaster Tools, is that it's never up to date. Mozbot, Googlebot and all the various crawlers have to crawl the links to show us link data. It can take a while between removal and another crawl, so the answer is 'patience'.
-
Thanks Travis! That's kind of what I was thinking but wanted to make sure.
I have one other question. When I run site explorer on my website, those backlinks from the forum still show up even though I deleted the signature link about 10 days ago. Will these eventually go away on their own? Or do I need to actively remove them?
-
It could be seen as a link of little value for all of the reasons you stated. If your site had a vast preponderance of little but forum links that pass juice/equity with exact match anchor text, like 'buy nike shoes', you would be heading into a possible penalty. That would show intent toward manipulation.
So the short answer is: Removing the links isn't going to help your site, but if they're truly removed they aren't going to hurt your site.
There would be other things to consider, if the forum related to your business. Some things to consider are referrals and conversions from referrals. But since you stated that the forum is unrelated, I won't worry about that.
If you haven't read this yet, it's a good idea that you do. Staying within those guidelines, and avoiding anything in the grey will generally keep your site in good standing from a linking perspective.
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
-
How to Diminish the spam score of the site?
I AM HERE TO DISCUSS MY PROBLEM AFTER THE GOOGLE CORE UPDATE OF OCTOBER MONTH MY WEBSITE SPAM SCORE IS INCREASING RAPIDLY HOW TO CONTROL THIS PROBLEM PLEASE HELP ME ASAP MY WEBSITE NAME IS EGYPT DIRECT
Link Building | | aprase1 -
Is it better to have backlinks from domains with medium DA, UR, using same language and good relevancy, or backlinks from domains with high DA, UR but using another language and with less relevancy?
Dear all, while I understand that quality backlinks with high DA, UR, same-language and relevancy would be best, would backlinks with high DA, UR but less relevancy and using languages other than the one used in my website be something good? Or would they do more harm than anything else and still be outcompeted by backlinks with lower DA, UR but same language and/or more relevancy? Thank you Frank
Link Building | | Frank_Smith0 -
What is a good tool for managing backlinks?
We have several that are not relevant and I need to manage the task of writing each to ask to remove.
Link Building | | Buzzfish0 -
Subdomain, Subdirectory or New Site?
Hi, we are currently exploring a new business sideline to our normal business (we are an emergency property & auto locksmith service). Our site has been established since 2005 (ish) - lockcity.co.uk The new sideline will also be another roadside emergency service but has nothing to do with keys/locks. In our marketing, we will be explaining that our new service is a trademark of Lock City, which will help customers understand why a Lock City van will be arriving. It doesn't make sense for us to have another page on the lock city web site to advertise this service, so wondered if you can recommend if I make a sub domain or create a new site? I understand that I am starting again with a new site, so the subdomain seems more favourable at the moment - but will this leak link juice from our existing business? Looking forward to some expert advice! Many thanks Regards, Abi
Link Building | | LockCity0 -
Question on backlinks indexing
Hello, my site is fairly new and I started building a lot of backlinks to it by posting my 5 from my website to several different web 2.0 and then posting all those 5 articles again to different article submissions + getting social bookmarks to my main site as backlinks. My question is: Should I throw all those backlinks in an indexer to get them all indexed at once / ping them all OR do I let google crawler naturally find them and index them itself sort of like 'dripping' as it will find it one by one; stack by stack? I would also like to know why Yahoo! hasn't indexed my site yet 😞
Link Building | | 6786486312640 -
How to increase the backlink count?
Hi i am new to blogging and new to SEOMOZ so any one can help me how to increase my backlink count
Link Building | | Trendymobiles0 -
Backlinks not showing
I have a website that is almost 2 months old and during this period I have built 477 links to my website.. however when I do a backlink check on Google.. link:mydomain.com, it says that there are no matches. How is it possible that none of my back links are indexed by Google?
Link Building | | b3pot6_gmail.com0