What is the best way to remove and fight back backlink spam?
-
Removing low quality and spam backlinks. What is the most effective clean-up process?
-
Hey Matti
Glad it helped buddy. Check out those tools, they won't do the job for you but they will certainly help out with some of the manual labour aspects.
Marcus
-
thank you for the response Marcus. so far it's not really that bad. I discovered that there were some pretty bizarre links that facilitated the atrophy of our rankings but not quite reach 90% spam links.Starting a new domain is far more than I think. I'll probably look at the tools that you suggested and see what's out there then.
Regards,
Matti
-
Hey Matti
In a nutshell, if it is really bad, then start again on a new domain.
What I am seeing with a few people I am helping is that where the site has had historical results, but is now penalised, attempting to clean up if the back link profile is pretty rotten (90% + placed links) is a pretty tough gig.
There are some tools out there that are proving useful and the pick of the bunch would be:
- rmoov
- Link Cleanup and Contact
- Remove’em
These all have pros and cons so you will likely want to use all of them.
Additionally, you will want to make sure the site is worth saving and likely invest some time and effort in generating some honest links through some solid content marketing. Maybe build some kind of free report or something specific to the site that you can use to do some outreach based link building. Do some blogging, invest some time and effort in the quality of the site.
Additionally, if you have a penalty, be prepared to put in a few requests and if you intend to disavow, be thorough.
With some experience here, you also have to ask yourself - what are you trying to save? If the answer to that question is that you are trying to save some spam links that still seem to be working at the moment, then, seriously, start again.
Without a link and some research it is hard to make a call but know this, it is a tough job to remove bad links and unless you have a link profile where there is something worth saving, then a new domain is likely the fastest way to sort out this mess and make sure you don't get hit again when they tighten up the link penalties down the road (you know it's going to happen).
There really is no generic answer here and every situation is different but be sure to know what you are getting yourself into before you undertake this and do an honest review of the site, the content and the links to make sure this is a battle you can win.
This is a good read:
http://cyrusshepard.com/penalty-lifted/
Hope that helps buddy
Marcus
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
-
Remove sitemap, effect ranking?
We are considering to remove our sitemap because it doesn't display the right structure. Will it affect current rankings if we remove the sitemap en continuing without a sitemap? Thanks
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry0400 -
Which way round to 301 redirect?
Hi We have just added a new layered navigation menu to our website. so for example we had Before : www.tidy-books.co.uk/chidlrens-bookcases (this has the seo juice) And Now: http://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-book-storage/childrens-bookcases Might be a stupid question but do I redirect the 'now' url to the 'before' url or the the other way round I look forward to hearing your thoughts Thanks
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Backlinks from unindexed pages - disavow ?
Hi I was analyzing my sites's backlinks and see a lot of the domains are not indexed by google.
Technical SEO | | VaiSam
I assume google has unindexed them - may be these domains are penalized. Should I request removal of my site's link from these pages ? What is the recommended approach in such a case? Thank you for your inputs.0 -
Finding Broken Back Links
Hello there I am new here but really want to mend my broken website by myself as I enjoy a challenge! I used to have great rankings but have moved websites a few times (same domain) and the last move was to wordpress. I now have loads of broken links in the SERPS and wondered if there was an easy way to flush google of them as they are getting lots of 404 errors? They really are too many to do a 301 on (I have done the main pages) Also how do I do a crawl of my website for any internal broken links? Does SEOmoz have something or is there an external program you would recommend? Thanks Victoria
Technical SEO | | vcasebourne0 -
Site links show spam
Hi folks, I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al. I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware. I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Best way to get SEO friendly URLSs on huge old website
Hi folks Hope someone may be able to help wit this conundrum: A client site runs on old tech (IIS6) and has circa 300,000 pages indexed in Google. Most pages are dynamic with a horrible URL structure such as http://www.domain.com/search/results.aspx?ida=19191&idb=56&idc=2888 and I have been trying to implement rewrites + redirects to get clean URLs and remove some of the duplication that exists, using the IIRF Isapi filter: http://iirf.codeplex.com/ I manage to get a large sample of URLS re-writing and redirecting (on a staging version of the site), but the site then slows to crawl. To imple,ent all URLs woudl be 10x the volume of config. I am starting to wonder if there is a better way: Upgrade to Win 2008 / IIS 7 and use the better URL rewrite functionality included? Rebuild the site entirely (preferably on PHP with a decent URL structure) Accept that the URLS can't be made friendly on a site this size and focus on other aspects Persevere with the IIRF filter config, and hope that the config loads into memory and the site runs at a reasonable speed when live None of the options are great as they either involve lots of work/cost of they involve keeping a site which performs well but could do so much better, with poor URLs. Any thoughts from the great minds in the SEOmoz community appreciated! Cheers Simon
Technical SEO | | SCL-SEO1 -
Best way to setup large site for multi language
Hello, I am setting up a new site which is going to be very large, over 250,000 products. Most of our customers are in the UK (45%), the rest are from various European countries and the USA. Unfortunately we only have a team of two people writing content for these pages in English. I would value some input on the best way to setup my website structure for ranking. Obviously the best would be individual country oriented domains I.e. domain.fr domain.de domain.co.uk . However we wouldnt have the time to create content for every page and most pages would contain the same content as the English domain. Would I get a penalty for this from google? The second choice is to follow the example of overstock.com and pull in information relating to each country I.e. currency and delivery time. this would be a lot easier but I am concerned that the lack of geo focus would effect my rankings. Does any one have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
How long to come back from a server outage?
We changed hosting companies two weeks ago, and we had a number of configuration issues that caused the site to go on and offline over that weekend. We fixed the problem but our traffic took a noticeable hit. I am assuming this is because our rankings dropped due to the site being down. Now that we're stable again, how long will it take for the traffic to return? is there anything I can do to speed up the process?
Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets0