Is It Required to Clean Natural Backlinks from an Irrelevant Niche?
-
Hi Friends,
My company website is a Travel related website and it is 18 years old domain. We purchased this domain in the year 2010 from a 3rd party person. That person was using the domain as a software portal like brothersoft.com. That person generated so many backlinks from software related websites like forums, gaming websites and so on. So, do I need to clean all those backlinks now because all those backlinks are from high page rank websites.
Not only the above concern I have. My website is very popular in Saudi and we get lot of backlinks naturally sometimes from the irrelevant niche. So, is it necessary to clean up those backlinks also. Pls advice me on this.
-
Google still internally values / devalues the links they discovered based on their algos. I think in 2011, when penalties and WMT notifications started to pop up, many SEOs forgot that Google still does a good amount of this internally. They'll react when it's egregious.
If you see pure spam in your backlink profile, Google suggests you go ahead and disavow. If you see otherwise good domains that are irrelevant (which it sounds like you do), then there's no reason to panic until Google misreads the intent and thinks you're trying to game the algorithm. If you're not doing that, you're probably in fine shape continuing to build good relevant links and creating the most relevant and valuable website possible.
egregious
-
Link audits are always helpful (hence why Moz specializes in them) but you want to identify bad or poor links. Relevancy is something that Google will determine for itself. I mean if a tire shop is linking to a florist Google might not give that link much weight but what if the tire shop has a blog and they want to thank said florist for sending flowers after a coworker dies? Google might not give it a lot of relevance to it, but it's also not necessarily spam.
Unless you can clearly identify that a given link is actively hurting you, I wouldn't remove/disavow it. Remember that link disavow is a flamethrower in that it can kill weeds and burn your house down. Which it does depends a lot on how you use it.
-
Periodically you should do a link audit. I call it a link detox and it is an ongoing issue for most sites.
It is really up to how how to judge a link but I use a combination of tools inclusion moz and majestic. Trust is a big factor. There are several factors to look at in undertaking a link audit.
Review https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation
Hope that assists. All that said if your site has never had a penalty I would do a tidy up, and be conservative in my disallows.
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
-
SEO traffic + backlinks question
Let's say I want to write a guest post for a website that is relevant to my website. Should i guest post on a website with high traffic but the traffic country is not mine? (eg// My website sells products in Canada only, should i guest post on a high traffic site from India?) Or would it be better to find a lower traffic website to guest post on but their organic traffic comes from Canada? Thanks!
Link Building | | chrisjordan0i10 -
301 redirect backlink
Hello, My website is brand new! I am planning to do have some 301 redirect backlinks. Is it safe in terms of SEO ? Do i have any SEO benefits? let me know. Thanks
Link Building | | EchoMartinez1 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
What is a natural link?
Hi everyone, I'm trying to better understand what is meant by a natural link and would appreciate any assistance. Doing some competitor link analysis I've noticed a web developer who has created a directory for all its customers. This is not a directory in the traditional sense of being of use to an end user, but to my untrained eyes, it looks like an internal directory used solely for the purpose of link building. For all I know this might be perfectly good practice in the industry, but as a beginner, I'm attempting to get an understanding of things. My question is, what precisely is meant by a natural link? If the above scenario is all ok, whereby there are businesses in the same field of work, but ultimately could be in any given location, on a directory, are they natural links? Do these kind of directories that don't service an end user, exist if the common feature between them is say location only, or an seo agency only? Appreciate I could be completely out of kilter on this, but it seems the benefit on SERPs is pretty significant for something that seems pretty "unnatural" to me? Any guidance would be appreciated...tom
Link Building | | T-J-I1 -
Which Backlinks to Disavow?
I am a site owner just getting to learn more about managing things myself after outsourcing SEO to a firm a year back (they stopped all activities about 8 months back). The question I have is about disavowing the low quality links. After collecting all the data from many sites on the basis of this helpful posting - (http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal), I am now left with around 2,800 back-links. I discovered most of the bad ones using ahrefs and majestic (and Google webmaster did not show many of the bad links). In fact, in the very first place, I realized that there was a spam problem when I saw the anchor cloud on ahrefs which showed many unrelated anchors for my site. I have three questions: **First, **Many URL's are actually from websites which have nothing to do with my line of business and I can sure spot them. What I get confused with is this - I can not say that these sites are downright spam. Some of them look to be good sites for example - a coffee machine vendor (with full business details and a fairly decent looking business), a Nike sports shoes mart etc. But they have nothing to do with my business. So my first question is - What is spam really? Would a back link from a high ranking website in the travel industry be considered spam from the point of view of someone who runs a website for medical equipment, specially if the back-link is from an unrelated anchor text like - "3 nights travel package" (which has nothing to do with medical business). I think I should disavow all the low quality back links with an erroneous anchor but Id like some views on this. Second, I see that in the disavow file, one could either upload a whole domain or a specific URL (could somebody please confirm this). I have some sites which have 8-12 (more in some cases) back links to my site. In most cases these sites are either really bad quality or have nothing to do with my business. I am tempted to disavow the entire domain for such sites instead of going by the URL's. Any views? Third, this is what I'd really like some help with. In case I delete the very pages (on my site) to which these back links point, should I still disavow the pointing domain? Finally: I have not created most of these backlinks. In fact, over the last 2-3 months we have started creating links from good sites in my industry. Most of the anchor cloud is good for me on ahrefs but there are these bad ones to which my question relates. I have not got any manual penalty from Google, though my traffic I think took a hit in the first week of October 2013.
Link Building | | sanar0 -
Article Backlinks To Product Pages
I am writing a number of 500 word articles and have read that Top 10 lists are becoming more and more popular on the web. So my thoughts are to write an article about the the 'Top 10 Mens Grooming Products 2013' for example. My questions is - do I post this article on my own website with the 10 links to the product pages using the product name as 'anchor text', or post the article to somewhere like Squidoo containing the links to my product pages. Which strategy has more SEO value?
Link Building | | Ubique0 -
Directories for backlinks
Hello, I was wondering whether directories are a good source of creating quality back links? Thanks
Link Building | | PeterAllen910 -
How to Check if a Sites Backlink Profile is Penguin Friendly?
Post penguin I am of course very wary about which sites I proactively solicit links from. Here is the scenario. Let's say for example I found a blog relevant to my business sector, had good domain authority/moz rank and noticed that they accepted guest posts. Sounds great? Well on the surface it sounds like it would be worth reaching out to the blog owner - but what if that blog had been involved in some really shady link building practices in the past and the reality is that I could end up damaging my own site by association. Can anyone share any useful resources such as articles or tools that will help to understand how to qualify if a sites backlink profile is shady and should be avoided as a link prospect?
Link Building | | Luia0