How to remove seemingly untouchable link spam
-
Hey Mozzers,
I have been struggling with this issue, and I am hoping someone can help.
I have a number of bad/spammy links to my site. We have never engaged in "bad SEO", but an old subdomain received a number of spammy blog comments, and everything seemed to escalate from there.
We have removed a subdomain that received all of the bad links from our DNS settings (about a year ago), but these links are still there when using Ahrefs or MajesticSEO. I don't think we have been penalized for these links, but I would just like to clean them up because, well, it's the right thing to do.
How does one do this when these sites seem so untouchable. Either they are from China, Russia, Denmark, abandoned in 2009, etc. If I look for someone to contact, I can't seem to find anyone to even email.
Suggestions?
-
Thanks Andy,
Appreciate your feedback.
-
yes I wouldn't wait for them to appear in WMT - just disavow them straight away.
-
Do you recommend disavowing them, even if they don't show up in my WMT Links?
-
As Andy stated, submitting a disavow request is your best bet, but it's not a quick, easy, or guaranteed solution. I found this article to be very helpful: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
If these spammy links are really from China, Russia, etc, then it's unlikely asking the site owners to remove them will get you anywhere - I guess it's worth a shot though. I would also work to build your site up with quality, shareable content that will help build natural links that are helpful to both the user & your site's domain authority - basically try to outnumber those old, spam links with good ones... and really, do this regardless of those old links.
I hope this helps!
-
Just put them in a disavow file and forget about them.
Your telling Google that you know these are bad links and you don't want them associated with your domain. I would do this sooner rather than later.
If you get a penalty you have to show evidence you have tried to contact these and get them some removed - whereas if you simply upload your disavow file you can forget about them.
Simple guide here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
Thanks
Andy
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Importance of external links in 2018
How important are external links in 2018. How much of a percentage do they represent when deciding to rank a page. I imagine it depends on the query but I was wondering it if 10 % of of 60 % ? My feeling is that with good content you can get on almost any query on the 1 st page without links because that would be too penalising to small business if they had no possibility to rank with just content. Looking forward to getting some feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics2 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Spam Score of 7??
Hi, I recently took on a client for local SEO and i started improving his on page optimization etc and now I'm continuing with link building. It's hard since it's a boring industry (medical waste disposal), but I have gotten some links. When I check up his link profile in OSE, it's still giving me a spam score of 7!!! and not showing the links I have acquired. I already removed the link it's showing up by contacting the website and it's not there anymore. The site is a very clean nice site, why am I getting such a high spam score? Thanks for your help! Rachel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rachel_J0 -
Sitelink Removal Timeframe
Hi Everyone, Has anyone had experience using the sitelinks demotion tool within GWT after a site redesign? How long does it take for the demotion to go into effect? We just went live with a new version of a site for one of our clients, and the generated sitelinks are no longer valid. I have demoted the urls associated with the old sitelinks, and it's been over a week with no change. Does anyone have experience in a similar situation? Also, for anyone looking for a time frame on changes to a meta description, after resubmitting an updated sitemap, it took 2 days for Google to display an updated meta description. Please advise, Chris Wilson
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_CM0 -
Create a link or redirect?
We have 60 demo movie pages on our site. We no longer link to these movie pages internally, because they are outdated; however, a lot of our partner companies are still linking to these pages. Some of these pages will have 10-15 linking root domains and a page authority of 30+... so pretty decent authority. These pages only include a movie on the pages, no links. I am trying to pass some of the link juice from these pages to other pages on our site. I am wondering if I should: A)Include transcripts on these pages, then link back to our current product page or solution pages? B)Set up redirects from these pages to a product or solution page? C)Set up a redirect to our homepage? Any advice? Thanks, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
How quickly should you aquire links?
Hi Guys, How often should you aquire links without getting into trouble with Goolge? Should you aqure a linka day? Or a link every 2 days? What should it be? Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0