Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?
-
My plan is to put all the root domains into http://netpeak.net/software/netpeak-checker/ check for PR main, status code, index, PA and DA. Then put them into Buzzstream which should go out and find the info for you. Then grab all the links from each spammy domain and provide them in the email to the webmaster to make them easier to remove. Hopefully this will make it a little more efficient.
-
I'm just using the free bit myself.
Its pretty new, but seems to work well enough. It may well pull some wrong info (or maybe pulls the info it gets to first)
- for the PR, does it always show the home page PR? Or does it calculate the PR for other pages by subtracting 1 for every click from the home page? I mainly ask so I can respond to client questions if they ever see the tool.
I doubt its that clever, its just aggregating data
S
-
Thanks for sharing this tool Stephen. I watched the video but the site does not share any info about the mechanics of the tool. Some questions:
-
how is the contact info pulled? I am wondering if it sometimes misses info or pulls the wrong info
-
for the PR, does it always show the home page PR? Or does it calculate the PR for other pages by subtracting 1 for every click from the home page? I mainly ask so I can respond to client questions if they ever see the tool.
-
any idea of what Agency pricing is?
I am just asking in case you happen to know some of this info. Otherwise I will reach out to the author.
Thanks again Stephen!
-
-
I've been using http://www.outreachr.com/bulk-domain-checker/ to pull data out of batches of urls for this. It goes and grabs link data from SEOmoz and then has a go at getting contact details including twitter etc
(Hope I don't kill his server while hes on holiday by posting this here)
-
Yes.
In the first case I shared, the client actually performed all the website contacts. I offered guidance on what was required and the client ran with it.
If my team was going to perform the work, I would request a mailbox be set up on the client's domain which we could use for this process.
-
Ryan are you using the client's email address? Seems it may get a better response rate
-
I wouldn't bother doing anything based on PR, would chase all backlinks that may appear in-organic.
-
We are left working with educated guesses. I would recommend a cleanup of spammy links for any client. If the client is currently not penalized, my judgment would focus only on sites listed in WMT which also have over 100 links pointing to the site.
Once the links have been cleaned up, I would check all client sites again after 30 days. Any client who exceeds 90% spam links clearly required further effort. No one knows where the threshold lies, but it's a pretty good guess that if 90% of your links are spammy you are not in a good place.
-
Thanks Ryan you've given me a lot to work with. Hell if I get good at this I might just create a whole new service for my agency lol.
Oh one more question and then I'll leave you alone. What about sites that haven't been hit yet, but have used similar tactics? Would you start this process for them? Or cross fingers?
-
Your process seems sound. A bit of additional feedback:
-
I would complete a Reconsideration Request but then proceed without delay to removing the links. You know the site has spammy links and should be removed.
-
I have no familiarity with Netpeak Checker but I'll take a look at the tool. Otherwise I cannot comment on it.
-
The "resubmit to Google" is not necessary. If they confirm the site has been manually penalized, they are seeking for you to remove all the spammy links. I have talked with others in this situation and Google is quite firm on their desire for you to address 100% of the problem. I would not bother submitting another Reconsideration Request until you have either removed all the manipulative links, or can show solid documentation of your efforts to do so.
Good Luck.
-
-
Yeah this all came right around "Penguin" so I'm fairly certain it's related. They do have a lot of exact anchor text too, but for a wide variety of terms. They were also using blog networks, and have spammy links, so it's really hard to pinpoint which of these or if all of them are the problem.
At any rate should this be my process?
- Resubmit to Google
- See if they answer back and with what
- If no answer proceed with removal
- Get links from webmaster tools
- Parse out Root linking Domains
- Run through Netpeak Checker (awesome tool if you haven't used it) finds PR, SEOmoz stats, Google index, status code, etc.
- First remove all PR 0 and live pages
- Resubmit to Google
- Second remove all deindexed PR 0
- Resubmit to Google
- Get other link source data (Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer)
- Remove PR 0 links
- Resubmit to Google
Hopefully that will do it. What do you think of this process? Oh and Thank you very much for your help You're awesome.
-
You can complete a Reconsideration Request. In the initial case, Google confirmed there was manual action taken. After the 100+ duplicate sites were taken down, Google then confirmed the remaining issue was due to the manipulative links.
With the recent Penguin update, Google may have automated part of this process into their algorithm.
-
Wow! I just have to give an expanded thanks (we don't have much room in the Endorsement area) for this detailed response. It's great to get some solid information about what it took to get a partial lifting of this penalty. It's certainly one I'll be sending other people to as an example of what to do.
-
**So Ryan in your opinion if they saw some major drops in rankings you would think it would be a safe bet that the site was penalized? **
Not necessarily. There are numerous issues which can cause ranking changes. A page could accidentally be blocked via "noindex" or robots.txt.
Diagnoses of a problem normally requires the highest level of skill. When you go to see a doctor with a problem and he or she can't figure out the cause of the problem, you are stuck....until another doctor comes up with the correct diagnosis. The pharmacy has all the right meds, but a diagnosis is required. The same holds true for SEO. When your business or health is on the line, you don't want to play guessing games.
-
In my opinion, whether Google chooses to index a page or not is not a consideration. You should remove all spammy links. Google could choose to reindex the page at any time and either way, they can still see the page with your link on it.
If anyone else has any solid information on this topic I would love to hear it. Otherwise I vote to play it safe, especially in a penalty situation.
-
Got another question for you. Do we even bother trying to get links from deindexed sites taken off or do you think Google takes those into account with the penalty?
-
So Ryan in your opinion if they saw some major drops in rankings you would think it would be a safe bet that the site was penalized?
They were also using Blog networks that got shut down, so those links have obviously been deindexed and therefore have no value which would drop the rankings anyway. That's the tricky part is the drop in rankings because the blog networks are gone or they are penalized.
-
Hi Ryan,
Great information.
We have had a tug of war with our SEO company who has built "unatural links". They claim it is impossible to do the job.
I wonder if you can explain your line ...if you build links on disposable sites which are not monitored, you clearly wont find help having them removed) and how the links were built." so that I can access how possible it is to get our bad links removed.
-
Thanks for the feedback Robert.
The main site to which I refer had a manual action placed in November 2011. Looking back, I would say it is was a prelude to Penguin. This site exceeded 99% of the links being manipulative so it is pretty clear any reasonable threshold would have been triggered.
What surprised me was how determined Google was about all the links being removed, and the level of documentation required. It is possible I simply received a hard-nosed Google employee but I really trust Google's manual team has a high degree of manual calibration in these cases. I think back to the leaked Google Panda notes and the tests to become a Google tester. They are extremely calibration focused. That's my two cents. It's just speculation but that would be my best guess.
-
Ryan,
This is impressive from the effort point of view alone; what sets it apart is your understanding of the need for documentation if you were to achieve success. So many sites had "SEO" firms do poor linking in the past and there was money to be made by just linking your junk to others. Unfortunately, many of these people went away or are of the type who would never take the time or energy to respond.
It would be interesting to know at what percentage of removal the Manual overseer will deem the site to be sufficiently rehabilitated on two levels:-
The first being the obvious that if a site can rehab to 35% for example the likelihood is google will lift the manual action.
-
The second being that, even at the example percentage of 35%, is it fair to the sites that did not go down that road that the "rehabilitated" site still has 65% of the inorganic links?
A question arises as to what caused the manual action?
Is the action taken as the result of some fixed ratio of organic to inorganic links?
Or, is it at least a varying percentage based on a given industry?
My guess is it is subjective on the part of those attempting to manually validate a huge piece of real estate.
Thanks for the excellent detail, you are truly a champ.
Robert
-
-
Wow great info Ryan. Is there a way to know for sure that a website has been penalized by Google and if this process needs to be started?
-
I have gained a lot of experience cleaning up spammy links over the past 6 months. This task is the most time consuming and unrewarding task in SEO. It is also necessary if your site has been manually penalized for "inorganic" links.
Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed?
I worked with Google on this topic for a client. My client's site was manually penalized specifically for "inorganic links". The client is an industry leader in their niche doing about $20 million in sales per year. They had millions of manipulative links pointed to their site from over 1000 linking root domains.
Step one: Google was absolutely firm in their expectation the links be removed prior to the penalty being lifted. This client had over 100 websites which were various forms of their main site (i.e. duplicate content). All the duplicate content sites were removed except the legitimate, human translated language variations of the site. We reported to Google these efforts which resulted in about 97% of the links being removed. Google responded that it was not enough and they required the links from the other external sites to be removed.
Step two of the process: we created an Excel spreadsheet to contact the sites giving priority to the sites with the most links. We tracked the following information: date of contact, initials of employee who performed contact, URL of domain, method of contact (e-mail / phone / contact us page), we provided a link to a copy of each e-mail we sent (see notes below), the date a response was received (if any), and a confirmation of whether the link was still visible.
Regarding the e-mails which were sent, they were very polite customized letters for each site. The letter format was as follows: introduction, description of the problem (i.e. our website has been penalized by Google...), the request to remove links, the location (URL) of all known links within their domain, and we thanked them for their efforts.
The results were we contacted hundreds of domains. The response rate was 14%. In this case, the company had these links built by another "SEO company" mostly between 2007 - 2009.
We reported our results to Google, shared the documentation and their response was:
"Thank you for your request and all of the follow up analysis. We've reviewed your case again, and unfortunately there are still many inorganic links pointing to the site. For example:..."
That led to step three: we went back to the original list of linking sites. For each and every site we covered four methods of contact: e-mail (if their address could be located), phone call (if a phone number could be located), contact us page (if the site offered one) and we looked up their WHOIS information and used that method of contact if the information was different then what was previously available.
Additionally, we went ahead and completed the list of contacting EVERY site who showed a link in Google WMT, even the hundreds of sites with only a single link. We knew our efforts would fail (14% rate of success) prior to starting so our focus was providing solid documentation. If you named a link we could present a copy of an e-mail request sent to remove the link, the date/time of when it was sent along with who sent it. That was the goal.
After submitting this final information to Google, they "partially" removed the manual penalty. The site seemed to rank normally but not as well as before. Google's response:
"Hello Ryan,
Thank you for your follow up email and all of the information provided. The documentation you provided was very helpful in processing and understanding this case.
After re-evaluating your site’s backlinks we are able to partially revoke a manual action. There are still inorganic links pointing to your site that we have taken action on. Once you’ve been able to make further progress in getting these links removed, feel free to reply to this email with the details of your clean-up effort"
Another client was also penalized but they had a single SEO company build most of their inorganic links. In this instance, the SEO company was able to remove almost all the links directly. They had control over many of the linking sites, they had retained their usernames / passwords to forums, etc. The success rate of link removal clearly depends on how long ago the links were built, how spammy the sites are (i.e. if you build links on disposable sites which are not monitored, you clearly wont find help having them removed) and how the links were built.
Good Luck,
-Ryan
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
-
Links on Brand Banners
Hi, For one of our ecommerce clients, we have brand banners on each brand page that links to their most popular product lines. Some of the banners just have a column of links, and some are paragraphs with copy and anchor text. Example below: Brand Line 1 Brand Line 2 Example 2: For the utmost in quality, performance and comfort, purchase Brand Line 1 . Brand Line 2 offers the perfect ease of use for beginners while not compromising on quality. Obviously these are just examples, and there are several links (more than 2) per brand, but I was wondering if this harms SEO in any way because of keyword stuffing? It makes sense to have the brand name in the link, otherwise the name of the lines might not make much sense (an example of this is one of the lines is called 849.. so without the brand name that doesn't mean much and looks weird) Do you think it would be better to have the links in just columns in the first example, or in paragraph format?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
How to find if a website has paid or spammy back-links? Latest ways to investigate.
Hi all, I would like to investigate about our website back-links if something is wrong. If there are any paid or spammy back-links. How to proceed on this exercise? We have been using ahrefs and seems like it's quite enough. Is there any way we can pull out the fishy back-links? Do we have any helpful data from webmasters about this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Internal Links & Possible Duplicate Content
Hello, I have a website which from February 6 is keep losing positions. I have not received any manual actions in the Search Console. However I have read the following article a few weeks ago and it look a lot with my case: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-cut-down-on-similar-content-pages-25223.html I noticed that google has remove from indexing 44 out of the 182 pages of my website. The pages that have been removed can be considered as similar like the website that is mentioned in the article above. The problem is that there are about 100 pages that are similar to these. It is about pages that describe the cabins of various cruise ships, that contain one picture and one sentence of max 10 words. So, in terms of humans this is not duplicate content but what about the engine, having in mind that sometimes that little sentence can be the same? And let’s say that I remove all these pages and present the cabin details in one page, instead of 15 for example, dynamically and that reduces that size of the website from 180 pages to 50 or so, how will this affect the SEO concerning the internal links issue? Thank you for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Never ending new links and our rank continues to plumet
HI everyone, I've been having an issue with a severe drop in rankings (#2 to #36ish). All of my technicals seem to be ok, however I seem to be getting my images hotlinked (which I have killed in nginx) from these spam like pages that pull and link to an image on my site, then link again with a " . " for the anchor. Even more strange is that these pages are titled and marked up with the same titles and target key words as my site. For example, I just got a link yesterday from a site leadoptimiser - d o tt- me which is IMO a junk site. The title of the page is the same as one of my pages, the page is pulling in images relevant to my page, however the image sources are repos EXCEPT for 2 images from my site which are hotlinked to my pages image and then an additional <a>.</a> link is placed to my website. I have gotten over 1500 of these links in the past few months from all different domains but the website (layout etc) is always the same. I have been slowly disavowing some of them, but do not want to screw up anything in case these links are already being discounted by G as spam and not affecting my rank. The community seems to be really split on the necessity of disavowing links like these. Because of these links, according to Ahrefs, my backlink profile is 38% anchor text of "." . Everything else checks out in my own review as well as Moz tools and Ahrefs with very high quality scores etc. Webmasters is fine, indexing is fine, pagespeed insights is in the 90's, ssl is A+. I've never had to deal with what seems to be an attack of this size. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | plahpoy1 -
"Via this intermediate Link" how do I stop the madness?
Hi, -1- I have an old site which had a manual spam action placed against it several years ago, this is the corporate site and unfortunately has its name placed on all business cards etc, therefore I am unable to get rid of this site entirely.. -2- I created a brand new site with a new domain name for which white hat SEO marketing has been done and very little of it... everything was doing well up until last week when I dropped from bottom of page one to top of page 11 for my keyword in question. -3- I changed the old sites ( the one with the manual spam action ) to mimic the look of the FIRST PAGE of the new domain I am using, and I have the main menu items on this first page linked to the appropriate sections within the new domain site, i.e About US etc. On this page I'm the following: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.mynewsite.com](view-source:http://www.norsteelbuildings.ca/)" /> and am linking as such: <li><a href="http://www.mynewsite.com/about/" class="" rel="<a class="attribute-value">nofollow</a>">ABOUT USa>li> using this approach I was hoping that I was doing the correct and not passing along any link juice good or bad however when I view the "Webmaster Tools->Links to your site" I find 1000+ links from my old site and then when I click on it I see all the spammy links that my old site got banned for pointing to my old site and accompanied by a header "Via this imtermediate Link>myoldSite.com". Can someone please sehd some light on what I should e doing or if even these link are effecting my new site, something is telling me there are but how do I resolve this issue.. Thanks in advance.. ```
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robdob120 -
Can image links help improve my backlinking profile?
I recently spent some time looking at the backlink profile of a leading UK food & clothing retailer and noticed that a high number of their backlinks for very competitive search phrase's consisted entirely of image backlinks. 50% of the links contained no alt text and other 50% contained a mix of just the targeted keyword or a phase containig one mention of the targeted keyword. Has anyone had any experiance of this type of marketing producing any positive effect on SEO or search engine rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigJonOne0 -
Manual Penalty Removed - Recovery Times...
Howdy Mozzers, For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback. How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty? Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon. Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem. "Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site." Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Big Brands Still Paying For Links!
We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0