Dealing with internal pages with bad backlinks - is this approach OK?
-
Hi all,
I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages.
These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.
I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs.
Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it?
Thanks in advance, Luke
-
Thanks Robert and Ryan for your great input on this, Luke
-
Ryan
Thanks for your input on this. The client is a seller of very big ticket item and the developer/seo she had was very clever at creating his own link farm/pyramid/etc.
The good news for her was that she had a lot of industry cites that linked to her site and she has always done a great job at her own PR which brought in more quality links.I was not trying to draw a corollary to specific links and PA/DA but show a broad picture around all the links (of which at least half were poor/bad) and how as those go away things change - which is I think a portion of what you are saying.
What I am showing with the images is that the links start going away and as the result DA/PA drops...but, we begin to see a concomitant rise in mozTrust which I believe can be taken as a signal - how exact I could not guess - that things will improve. It would appear that based on your comments I was a bit less than clear - thanks for the assist.
The reason we did not go into aggressive link removal with the client was due in large part to her relationship with past dev. She was very concerned about how they perceived their treatment. We had to be a bit cautious and we understood (and told her) the possible consequences.
Thanks for your clarity; I do believe there is more to come from Google around this issue.
All the best,
Robert
-
Hi Robert,
Thanks for sharing this information from your current case study. It is always great to see real data.
The only piece of actionable information I am able to gather from the images is the number of links to your client's site has dropped dramatically. I love and use Moz metrics regularly (PA/DA/mT/mR) but they mainly examine the total number of links and the metrics of the linking site. PA/DA do not distinguish a good link from a bad link.
I am sure we can examine a spammy site and notice high PA/DA but lower mT but if you look at an OK site with many links like that of your client, the results are much harder to distinguish, especially if they have a mix of good and bad links. I have to presume if you client is consistently selling millions in product sales they have earned some good links.
To be clear, I offer link removal services to clients so I have a bias, but I also do not want to offer those services but feel compelled to do such. My pricing model is based on earning clients long term, not earning profits from site owners who are at their most desperate time. For almost every client I worked with, if I saw a significant amount of manipulative links to their site then they you can examine their analytics and see significant traffic drops since the time Google began penalizing sites for manipulative links.
I can even recall around April 1st I accepted a new client. I examined his backlink profile and advised the client to clean up their link profile. The client agreed and we began work and then on April 24th the client was hit be Penguin. In my experience, manipulative links need to be removed. Even if I am wrong, I expect the next Penguin update to hit sooner rather then later, and in waves like Panda. When it does, expect a lot more sites to be impacted. We can only hope Google introduces a "disavow" feature before the next Penguin update.
Some data from a penalized client I am working with now:
-
client site name is 100% keyword base
-
client spent over 1 million on purchasing their domain name.
-
client has numerous manipulative links
Metrics:
Home page PA 70, DA 63, mR 4.7, mT 5.4
This client's site has nothing to do with food, but let's compare metrics with a site without manipulative links. I use Kentucky Fried Chicken as my goto site for such things, as they are a large company which seemingly does not work with a SEO consultant (hey Colonel, give me a call!):
Home page PA 85, DA 81, mR 6.0, mT 6.3
Clearly kfc.com is a stronger site all around, but there is nothing I can gain from looking at these numbers to tell me how my client's site is penalized for manipulative links and does not even rank for the exact match of his domain name anymore. Based on my experience, once we remove the links the site will pop right back up in SERPs. Sure they will take some form of hit due to the lost links, but the site can freely rank once again.
-
-
Luke
Even with 4 out of 24 I would think your issue will likely fall into line with this post by Barry Schwartz with SearchEngine Roundtable about manual link actions
Even if they were to go to this degree, the only pages that would be effected would be the ones with the links. And, it is likely the degree of that effect would be the mitigation of any algorithmic impact from the "bad" links.
I still think that by taking a bit less drastic approach, you can achieve your aims. Understand, there is no guarantee in that, I am telling you what I would do. I can tell you that I was looking at a client site yesterday and when we took on the site in Jan/Feb, she had some of the worst looking link pyramids, etc. I have seen. It was junk.
We changed hosting which changed IP and obviously linking C blocks. But, we did nothing but watch the links. We did not go after dropping them, etc. In May, Penguin arrives and we see changes begin. But, we did nothing but watch.
As you can see there are changes, but on the whole even with all the BS there is nothing totally detrimental. NOTE: This site sells an extremely high dollar product (7 figures) so a minor fluctuation in ranking does not effect it on the order it would an ecommerce site for example. But, I am encouraged at seeing how the effect on DA is negligible and it is now rising, etc. Also, look how we have lost LRD's but mozTrust is rising. Interesting at least.
So, I do not know if this is helpful, but I certainly hope it is.
Best
FhRUA.png?1 FhRUA.png?1 c4WuO.png?1 c4WuO.png?1 c4WuO.png?1 FhRUA.png?1 c4WuO.png?1 liBXP.png?1 YpkU8.png?1
-
Hi Robert and thanks for your feedback there - 4 out of 24 pages are of some concern here. SERPs and enquiries from these internal pages is, good so they did get some ROI from their linkbuilding work. That said, not sure leaving things as they stand is worth the risk. This is locally-focused SEO, in an area without huge competition.
Regarding these 4 pages, I'm seeing a mix of article submission / social bookmarketing going on and use of poor quality directories (in the main using same directory description text over and over again, and the same article submission text) - though I haven't found any gambling or other such website nasties backlinking to the website in question.
Of these 4 pages, I'm seeing between 100 and 250 backlinks per page (Homepage has around 800 backlinks - generally OK and all looks very natural) - and no other internal pages, other than these 4 pages, have more than 5 backlinks each.
-
Luke,
The first thing I see is this sentence: These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.
So in answering you, I will treat it as I would a client. Do these pages bring you business, improve your ROI, etc.? If the answer is yes, I am going to approach the problem very cautiously. Let's assume they are important.
For those pages that are offending you say there are a couple (I will guess that means not more than 5). If your site is fairly large 50 plus pages for example, I do not see these pages impacting the site negatively in our current environment. But, you could simply send a few messages out to those linking and request that they remove the links.
Keep a record that you did and send more than one request. At the same time, go out and get a few good links to the same pages to make the weight change a bit toward better links.If you change the urls of the pages there is no need to change 404. Simply leave it as a search for what you were looking for. Those directories won't be searching. You are correct in not doing redirect involving old urls in this case.
Hope this helps and provides a bit of perspective.
best
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
-
Dealing with Dodgy Looking Traffic
Hi there I am really hoping someone can help. The site I run has started receiving traffic from the US (we are a UK run firm who don't ship overseas). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a massive problem but the traffic is coming directly to lots of pages and instantly bouncing. I am worried this is going to negatively impact my rankings as drop off rate and conversions are getting hammered by this 'fake traffic'. The attached image shows the traffic for the homepage but its happening on every page with hundreds of hits bouncing and hurting my stats. Is there any way of dealing with this or reporting it to an authority or even Google itself? Any help would be greatly appreciated. George 7vprsJo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrinvaleBird0 -
On Page #2 of Bing But Nowhere on Google. Please Help !
Hi, community. I have a problem with the ranking of my blog and I hope anyone could help me to solve this problem. I have been trying to rank my blog post for a keyword for almost 6 months but still getting no success. My URL is: this blog post
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Airsionquin
Target keyword: best laptops for college The interesting fact is that the post has been on page #2 of BING but nowhere on google. It was on page #3 of google for about one month, but it's been 1-2 weeks gone(not ranked anymore but it's still well indexed). The post has been replaced by another post of my blog(let's say post A) which doesn't have any link. The Post A is ranking on page #4 right now.
The weird thing is my post which ranks for this keyword frequently changes. One day the Post A was on page#4 then after a few days it changed to the post B. Yesterday I searched on google for a keyword "number one on bing but nowhere on google" and then I
come across to read this article on MOZ community and one of the people here said that it was over optimization issue. I think my post has been suffering for an over optimization penalty algorithm. Just for your information, I have been building backlinks to this URL for the last 5 months(it's 1+ year old). It has backlinks only about 1,5k from 200 domains(according to ahref). I have used the exact match anchor only under +/- 2%. The rest is branded, naked URL and generic anchors.
So, in this case, I thought that I haven't done any over anchor optimization.
I have checked the keyword density and I found it was "safe". One important thing I can remember before the post has gone is I add a backlink from lifehack.org(guest post) with exact match anchor.
I suspect this is really the cause because 2-3 days after doing that then the post is gone(dropped) and replaced by another post of my blog(as I've mentioned before). But it's very strange because the amount of the anchor keyword(including the long tail) is only about 10(from 200 domains) or only 5% which mean it should be safe. I'm so Sorry. It's a long story 🙂 So, What is actually happening to my post? and How to fix this problem... Please..please help me... Any hep is appreciated. By the way, Sorry for my poor english.. 🙂0 -
A doorway-page vendor has made my SEO life a nightmare! Advice anyone!?
Hey Everyone, So I am the SEO at a mid-sized nationwide retailer and have been working there for almost a year and half. This retailer is an SEO nightmare. Imagine the worst possible SEO nightmare, and that is my unfortunate yet challenging everyday reality. In light of the new algorithm update that seems to be on the horizon from Google to further crack down on the usage of doorway pages, I am coming to the Moz community for some desperately needed help. Before I was employed here, the eCommerce director and SEM Manager connected with a vendor that told them basically that they can do a PPC version of SEO for long-tail keywords. This vendor sold them on the idea that they will never compete with our own organic content and can bring in incremental traffic and revenue due to all of this wonderful technology they have that is essentially just a scraper. So for the past three years, this vendor has been creating thousands of doorway pages that are hosted on their own server but our masked as our own pages. They do have a massive index / directory in HTML attached to our website and even upload their own XML site maps to our Google Web Master Tools. So even though they “own” the pages, they masquerade as our own organic pages. So what we have today is thousands upon thousands of product and category pages that are essentially built dynamically and regurgitated through their scraper / platform, whatever. ALL of these pages are incredibly thin in content and it’s beyond me how Panda has not exterminated them. ALL of these pages are built entirely for search engines, to the point that you would feel like the year was 1998. All of these pages are incredibly over- optimized with spam that really is equivalent to just stuffing in a ton of meta keywords. (like I said – 1998) Almost ALL of these scraped doorway pages cause an incredible amount of duplicate content issues even though the “account rep” swears up and down to the SEM Manager (who oversees all paid programs) that they do not. Many of the pages use other shady tactics such as meta refresh style bait and switching. For example: The page title in the SERP shows as: Personalized Watch Boxes When you click the SERP and land on the doorway page the title changes to: Personalized Wrist Watches. Not one actual watch box is listed. They are ALL simply the most god awful pages in terms of UX that you will ever come across BUT because of the sheer volume of this pages spammed deep within the site, they create revenue just playing the odds game. Executives LOVE revenue. Also, one of this vendor’s tactics when our budget spend is reduced for this program is to randomly pull a certain amount of their pages and return numerous 404 server errors until spend bumps back up. This causes a massive nightmare for me. I can go on and on but I think you get where I am going. I have spent a year and half campaigning to get rid of this black-hat vendor and I am finally right on the brink of making it happen. The only problem is, it will be almost impossible to not drop in revenue for quite some time when these pages are pulled. Even though I have helped create several organic pages and product categories that will pick-up the slack when these are pulled, it will still be awhile before the dust settles and stabilizes. I am going to stop here because I can write a novel and the millions of issues I have with this vendor and what they have done. I know this was a very long and open-ended essay of this problem I have presented to you guys in the Moz community and I apologize and would love to clarify anything I can. My actual questions would be: Has anyone gone through a similar situation as this or have experience dealing with a vendor that employs this type of black-hat tactic? Is there any advice at all that you can offer me or experiences that you can share that can help be as armed as I can when I eventually convince the higher-ups they need to pull the plug? How can I limit the bleeding and can I even remotely rely on Google LSI to serve my organic pages for the related terms of the pages that are now gone? Thank you guys so much in advance, -Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VBlue1 -
Have just submitted Disavow file to Google: Shall I wait until after they have removed bad links to start new content lead SEO campaign?
Hi guys, I am currently conducting some SEO work for a client. Their previous SEO company had built a lot of low quality/spam links to their site and as a result their rankings and traffic have dropped dramatically. I have analysed their current link profile, and have submitted the spammiest domains to Google via the Disavow tool. The question I had was.. Do I wait until Google removes the spam links that I have submitted, and then start the new content based SEO campaign. Or would it be okay to start the content based SEO campaign now, even though the current spam links havent been removed yet.. Look forward to your replies on this...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Starting every page title with the keyword
I've read everywhere that it's vital to get your target keyword to the front of the title that you're writing up. Taking into account that Google likes things looking natural I wanted to check if my writing title's like this for example: "Photographers Miami- Find the right Equipment and Accessories" ..Repeated for every page (maybe a page on photography in miami, one on videography in Orlando etc) is a smart way to write titles or if by clearly stacking keywords at the front of every title won't be as beneficial as other ways of doing it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
Why Google still display search result so bad?
When I search this keyword Backlink คือ by Google browser(Google.co.th) then I saw these Domain that is spam keyword and worse content (Spin content and can not understand what it said) อํานาจเจริญ.dmc.tv/?p=19
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | taradmkt
ฉะเชิงเทรา.dmc.tv/?p=28 พังงา.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink หนองคาย.dmc.tv/?p=97 ขอนแก่น.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink ชัยนาท.dmc.tv/?p=70 ตราด.dmc.tv/?tag=backlink etc As you can see the search result**.** My question is 1. How to tell Google to check these network 2. Why these network display Top 10 for 3 weeks!!!!! and after that they rank drop. 3. Why Facebook page rank on Google in the search result Please make me clear.0 -
HOW TO: City Targeted Landing Pages For Lead Generation
Hi guys, So one of my clients runs a web development agency in San Diego and for lead generation purposes we are thinking of creating him city targeted landing pages which will all be on different domains ie. lawebdesginstudio / sfwebdesigngurus I plan to register these 20-30 domains for my client and load them all up on a my single linux server I have from godaddy. I noticed however today using google's keyword tool that roughly only 5-10 cities have real traffic worth trying to capture to turn into leads. Therefore I am not sure if its even worth building those extra 20 landing pages since they will receive very little traffic. My only thought is, if I do decide to build all 30 landing pages, then I assume I will have a very strong private network of authority websites that I can use to point to the clients website. I mean I figure I can rank almost all of them page 1 top 5 within 2-3 months. My question is: 1. Do city targeted micro sites for the purpose of lead generation still work? If so are there any threads that have more info on this topic? 2. Do you suggest I interlink all 30 sites together and perhaps point them all to the money site? If so i'm wondering if I should diversify the ip's that I used to register the domains as well as the whois info. Thanks guys, all help is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AM2130 -
Do shady backlinks actually damage ranking?
That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"? That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices? Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices? I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yoni450