Asking Sites to Remove Links.. What should I say?
-
After getting some guidance from you guys here on this forum i have decided to go through my WMT backlinks and contact all the sites that I think are spammy and are linking back to me....and I will ask them to remove my links from their sites...
Can you guys please provide some guidance as to what I should say in the letter (also, anything i should definitely not say)....
Thanks for the help...
-
That's a great question and I really don't know the answer....
How would i find out? My site is still indexed, its just ranking very poorly for the keywords that most of these links used as anchor text....
-
Have you been penalised? Or are you just no longer seeing the effects of the links that google has now devalued?
-
I agree that it is a different story if you have been penalized, but I would try to find out if that is the true reason as to why you have been penalized. It very well may be ... but what else have you been doing that may have caused the problem? Have you hired anyone to get you links recently?
-
I didn't know that google was complaining about your links.
If you or someone you hired bought links, traded links or made arrangements to have links created for your site then you might try contacting those webmasters, tell them that google doesn't like the links and ask them to remove them.
Good luck.
-
Sounds like you got a penalty. In that case, you definitely want to make an effort to remove as many as possible. Document the effort you put into it. How many sites you contact for removal and how many links you have successfully removed.
This data will likely help when you file a reconsideration request.
The main problem is, spammy links are a lot harder to remove than they are to acquire. Best of luck.
-
But my rankings have dropped terribly and i got a notice in my WMT that G detected an unnatural flow of links... and within a week i went from page 1 to page 10 on my main keyword... I think i need to try and remove some of those... Do you still think it's not necessary?
-
I agree with EGOL - it is not worth the resources to remove them and most likely they are not hurting your site.These types of links will become inevitable as your site grows.
-
Lots of these types of links are simply part of the content on spammy websites. They are often produced by a robot that scrapes websites and republishes snips of their content, including links. The more popular your website becomes the more of these types of links you will acquire. In some industries there are enormous numbers of spam websites. My site has a million of these links and I am not going to do anything about it. It would cost thousands of dollars in labor just to make "an attempt" at contacting these people and I bet that the response rate will be really really low. Google knows that these sites are trash. I don't think that those links are helping or hurting very much at all.
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
-
Re: Inbound Links. Whether it's HTTP or HTTPS, does it still go towards the same inbound link count?
Re: Inbound Links. If another website links to my website, does it make a difference to my inbound link count if they use http or https? Basically, my site http://mysite.com redirects to https://mysite.com, so if another website uses the link http://mysite.com, will https://mysite.com still benefit from the inbound links count? I'm unsure if I should reach out to all my inbound links to tell them to use my https URL instead...which would be rather time consuming so just checking http and https counts all the same. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | premieresales0 -
Should I revive the old domain or just redirect all the juicy links to my new site?
I'm about to acquire a domain with a lot of great/highly authoritative backlinks. The links pointing to the domain are quite powerful and the domain is an exact match TLD. I have two options (that I know of 😞 1. I could redirect all the links to their new home(s) on my new site which offers the same resources the old site used to offer. or 2. I could rebuild the tools/content on this site. Ideally, I'd transfer to my new site as all those powerful links could help all my rankings. However, I'm worried that some of the powerful links will de-link once they see the site redirects elsewhere, even though it's offering the same content. Also, option one isn't an exact match domain. Which, I know, shouldn't make a difference now-a-days but regardless of what people say, it still seems to help out some sites in less competitive niches. One more thing to note: The domain that I'm purchasing is about 25 years old. I'm leaning toward option one. I want to make sure I put my best foot forward on this investment and thought it wise to consult the SEO gods.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Can Google read content/see links on subscription sites?
If an article is published on The Times (for example), can Google by-pass the subscription sign-in to read the content and index the links in the article? Example: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/property/overseas/article4245346.ece In the above article there is a link to the resort's website but you can't see this unless you subscribe. I checked the source code of the page with the subscription prompt present and the link isn't there. Is there a way that these sites deal with search engines differently to other user agents to allow the content to be crawled and indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
Google webmaster tools showing "no data available" for links to site, why?
In my google webmaster account I'm seeing all the data in other categories except links to my site. When I click links to my site I get a "no data available" message. Does anyone know why this is happening? And if so, what to do to fix it? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
How to remove an entire subdomain from the Google index with URL removal tool?
Does anyone have clear instructions for how to do this? Do we need to set up a separate GWT account for each subdomain? I've tried using the URL removal tool, but it will only allow me to remove URLs indexed under my domain (i.e. domain.com not subdomain.domain.com) Any help would be much appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0