Remove Bad Links Or Build New
-
Hello,
After deeply assessing our back links we have come to the conclusion that we have too many links that have been devalued and also some spammy looking links....
Our next question is do we remove these bad links and start a fresh or do we just build new white hat links??
Thanks,
Scott
-
There is no real point in removing links. Links that have been devalued simply don't pass the benefit onto your site. The only real reason you would attempt to remove links is if you have been penalized by Google, but even then I would be dubious at removing links as Google can see that you are able to remove links - hence making it look unnatural.
-
Has it penalized you, or just the links got devalued? Are you ranking for brand KWs? If so, don't waste time - keep building.
-
Remove if you can but certainly start building new natural and genuine links to counterweight any previous negative signals on your website's link profile.
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
-
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?
Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | KristyFord0 -
Confused on footer links (Which are best practices for footer links on other websites?)
Hello folks, We are eCommerce web design and Development Company and we give do follow links of our website to every projects which we have done with specific keywords. So now the concern is we are seeing huge amount of back-links are being generated from single root domain for particular keyword in webmaster tools. So what should be the best way to practice this? Should we give no follow attribute to it or can use our company logo with link? LtMjHER.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
How does your crawler treat ajax links?
Hello! It looks like the seomoz crawler (and google) follows ajax links. Is this normal behavior? We have implemented the canonical element and that seems to resolve most of the duplicate content issues. Anything else we can do? Example: Krom
Technical SEO | | AJPro0 -
Is it possible to build a new site and replace it
Hi i have a site that i want to re build because it has moved away from what i wanted it to do and deleted a lot of the site and due to this has caused a lot of errors. My site is built in the old joomla and i want to build a brand new site in the new version. My site in2town.co.uk which is a lifestyle magazine runs very slowly and what i want to do because it has a lot of problems under the google webmaster control panel, is to rebuild the site and turn it back into the site it should be instead of trying to make it into so many different things. The problem i have is, i have thousands and thousands of great links going to the site and i am worried about losing these links. It would take me about a day to turn it into the site it should be and improve it. My hosting company have said that i can put it under a sub domain the new site and then when i have built it, they can then move it under the correct name. But what i am worried about is, the site is very slow at the moment, and i am worried that by doing this that it would not solve the problem of making it faster even though i have a dedicated server. I want the site to be brand new with no errors and i am worried by doing this that the site will run slowly because i am still working off the old script. I have tried migrating the older version into the new joomla but it could not be done and caused problems so this could be my only other option. Any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Onpage linking
On my homepage, I currently link to about 40 internal pages. I'm considering altering the internal linking structure to have 50-100 links on the 2nd level pages. If I was to do this, I'd only need 8 homepage links. Do you think the 8 pages linked from the homepage would go up in the SERPs as the pagerank would be less diluted? I've heard so many mixed views on this. Be interested to see what people here think. Thanks, Pete
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Amazon s3 links
Hello, Dose anyone has experience with Amazon s3 ? Hosting images, site elements and static files (pdf etc) on Amazon S3 bucket can influence the link structure / juice ? (by having external links to the amazon s3 bucket / account). If you host all the site images and site resources with Amazon S3 will all those "links" count as outgoing external links ? Is it worst then having everything linking internally ? Dose anyone knows if that can hurt you ? Personally I was not able to test it and I am sure I can't test it in the near future. Hope someone has and I can skip some steps with this. Thanks !
Technical SEO | | eyepaq1