Best Course of Action For Over Optimized Link Profile
-
I'm working on a few sites right now and before I came on board, they purchased spammy link building packages. For instance, one site shows 3.8k links from 600 root domains. As you can guess, these are ALL spammy pages with dozens to hundreds of links on each. They're all targeted keywords to the homepage. Our other site shows 600+, and again, all spammy links from unrelated spam sites and free link directory packages.
The site in question had duplicate content taken from other sites and about 7 pages total indexed. It has since been updated to a WordPress theme with original content and many additional pages. It also has proper SCHEMA locations as it is a legitimate, local business.
We receive next to no organic traffic, the pages don't rank for the terms (duh), and basically I'm concerned with moving forward. I don't want to spend time building legitimate links to our sites if we're already nuked by Google.
What I'm asking is, do any of you have experience _successfully _using the disavow tool to remove past links? I really don't think a solid link building campaign to our newly updated site is going to undo the thousands of spammy and over-optimized links we have in place already.
How likely is it that Google gets the point that we are a legitimate site with new, fresh content when the site receives legitimate links from related sites and such?
-
Sounds like you're on the right track, nice job! And, I agree with you, I wouldn't pay a company to remove links, even if I paid them to put them up in the first place. Especially since you have the power of the disavow tool.
Good luck!
-
Hi Kristina,
Thanks for the response. Your outline is honestly the exact steps I've taken, only I didn't use RMOOV or any other service to identify the bad links because virtually ALL of our links were bad.
Here's what I did:
I downloaded all of our links from both OSE and WMT and stripped duplicates. I then used an Excel add-in that stripped ROOT domains into the B column. I combined that with some Excel functions to compare a list of domains I'd created (good domains, such as our local citations) and return a result if they showed up. That way I could enter a list with Yelp, Angie's List, etc. and remove the "good" links. So I stripped out duplicates, good domains, and had the rest.
I got all the WHOIS information I could by using this Bulk WHOIS checker and grouped domains together with the same WHOIS information (as well as sites which were clearly part of the same network). I've sent out hundreds of requests and screen shotted all of them for when the time comes to prove our case to Google.
And I've been keeping the disavow sheet current as I go along, noting sites which have no contact information, appear to be down for now (still disavowing in case they return), and sites which demand payment to remove links.
And as you asked about in the end, I contacted the company which purchased/built these links in the first place. They claimed they still had control over them. When I asked them about removing them, they stopped responding. They're shady, and honestly I wouldn't feel comfortable paying them to remove links, because they could just generate more in the future and offer their "link removal services" to us down the line.
Thanks again for the response! I'm still plugging away at removing these crappy links. One day the profiles will be balanced enough to sustain Google's algorithm changes!
-
Unfortunately, I'm not sure of a way you can go about this quickly without a service like Link Detox and RMOOV. But, if I were in your shoes, I would:
- Get a list of all URLs pointing to your site. Sounds like you already have one, based on the question.
- If you're willing to use a service, use Link Detox to identify spammy links. If you'd like to do this on your own, get the PageRank for each link (it'll be quicker with an API, but you can always use Google's toolbar). If it's a PageRank 0, it's probably bad.
- Manually review PageRank 1 and 2 sites. Sorry, no way to skip that without using a tool.
- Get a list of spammy sites that you'd like to remove links from. Use Whois to find the contact information. They have an API as well.
- Email all of them. This needs to be done by you regardless of whether or not there's a tool out there for it, because you're going to need to have those emails as evidence that you're taking steps to clean this up in case you ever get hit by Penguin.
- After giving them enough time to respond, and a few follow up emails, disavow any links that webmasters weren't willing to take links down for.
You didn't make it sound like it's an option, but it's worth mentioning that many of these sites may still be owned by the person who was originally paid to put those links up. Any chance you could dig through finances to get contact information for all paid links and remove them that way?
Good luck!
-
Hey Gary,
Thanks for the helpful response and I'm sorry to hear about your site being hit. I don't think our site was ever "hit" by anything. The only link building that has been done were the spam packages that were purchased before I came on board.
But even if we haven't been hit yet, I really doubt we'll be able to climb too high with these links in place. I guess I have no chance but to start requesting that these links be removed.
Do you have any helpful hints on how I can go about this quicker? Is the Link Assistant tool any good? I see that it has options for importing links and searching their page for contact information w/ a built-in email client. Any ideas?
Thanks all.
Edit: Just to clarify, I know there are services for this like RemoveEm and RMOOV. I'm curious about software being available to do this ourselves. Thanks.
-
You could be just one more Penguin revision away from a penalty.
I would get most of those bad links in a disavow file right away. The start to contact as many as you can and get the worst ones removed. this will safeguard you from a future penalty.
Once this is done you will have to wait for Google to re-crawl all those links to apply the nofollow attribute via the disavow.
While you wait for that to happen you can start by getting some traction on white hat link building / outreach.
This whole process can be done very very quickly. You must also confirm that the issue of rank drop is related to Penguin or you may see very little changes.
I have a site that was hit so hard by panda and Penguin that its been very difficult to recover and a new domain could be on the cards. Its a large site with a big brand that has been around for 10 years but almost 3 years of bad rankings has been a nightmare and very expensive path for the company to have taken up to this point. Who knows where the company would have been if it was moved to a new domain with 3 years of work applied to it.
-
Thanks for the response. I agree. One thing I want to mention is that each of these sites are connected to Webmaster Tools and none of them have alerts for unnatural or spammy link building.
Also, one of the sites in question ranks for a bunch of keywords in spots 40-80, so Google hasn't totally devalued the domain.
To answer your question, yes, it would be worth it if it would have an impact on the rankings. What I'm curious about is how damaging these links can be. I mean, obviously they're bad, no questions about that. But if Webmaster Tools hasn't sent a message and we currently have some rankings, we can't be totally screwed, can we?
Thanks again for the response. Bah, such a difficult situation.
-
This is really a question of labor versus value. You can use tools as well as contact other sites that have bad links and disconnect that way. It can be done but it takes a lot of time. If it is worth the labor cost do it. If it is not, don't
-
Thanks for the response, Jeff.
I actually meant to include a bit about starting over in the original post as I'd considered that. These sites are for local businesses which have LOTS of local business situations throughout the web. They're legitimate businesses with Yelp reviews and Google+ pages and such and the search engines have absolutely linked the sites with the businesses. I feel like this is the only reason why they're not completely sandboxed and crushed in Google's eyes because they're legit, solid businesses.
So the domain name isn't AMAZING, but it's the company name and lots of legit, local "building" has been done in the previous years just by it functioning as a legitimate business. We have many citations throughout the web that link this business NAP to the site and correcting all of these would be kind of a hassle (even with a service like Yext).
Another site has 375 links, nearly all from directories. I know these links suck, but a small site shouldn't be completely crushed by a directory link package, should it?
-
Unless it's a particularly amazing domain name, this is an issue that's going to follow you for quite some time. The disavow link system can be helpful in circumstances like this, but it's always been promoted by Google as a tool of last resort.
Not knowing much about the site, my $0.02 would probably vote for a clean slate with a new domain name, and shut down the older site.
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
-
Value of Links? What is each link worth?
Morning Everyone, I just had this thought and wondered what everyone's opinions were in terms of link value in monetary terms. We'll assume for the purposes of this that the links come from contextually relevant sites and that the sites in question have got the Moz DA from being high quality and have a good quality incoming link profile. Its a bit of a theoretical question, but i guess imagine if the only way you could get links was to pay for them, what would they be worth to you. This is link value for SEO purposes, they will have in addition value from traffic from good sites, that no doubt varies wildly depending on topic. I assume everyone also agrees on: The first link from a domain is the most valuable High DA sites are worth more than low ones. So could anyone who has an opinion on the link value suggest a monetary value for links. Its really just using a monetary amount to see how best to target my time. Here is my example of what might be expected, but I am hoping people with more knowledge will perhaps correct it. DA Rating First Link 2nd-5th Link 5th-10th Link 10Plus Links 5 $5 $2 $1 $0 15 $7 $3 $2 $1 25 $25 $10 $5 $2 35 $45 $20 $7 $3 45 $65 $30 $11 $4 55 $95 $45 $19 $5 65 $200 $100 $45 $6 75 $350 $120 $65 $9 85 $700 $240 $95 $15 95 $1100 $450 $200 $30
Link Building | | wellandpower1 -
Effects of a bad link linking to a image
i am getting a lot of links from wallpapers sites.. One person has created 1000's of similar sites that are linking back to my images. My guess is images do not pass link value positive or negative. But I am not sure what the potential effects would be. Does anyone know who linking to images might effect SEO especially when there coming from horribly low quality auto generated sites.
Link Building | | KentH0 -
If I disavow bad links on "disavow link webmaster" will they still show up on my moz reports?
We recently found out we have a lot of bad links linking back to our website from spam sites, I disavowed them through the google disavow link webmaster. On my moz report it still shows the links, is that normal?
Link Building | | Ryan.Cruz0 -
AllTop Linking Me to Other Sites Feeds, Webmasters Reporting Lots of Broken Links
I submitted my blog to All Top awhile ago and something seems to be wrong with their feed. They're sending people to mysite.com/truth-o-meter.com/this-is-a-post. It's not just truth-o-meter either. I'm getting links that are supposed to go to all kinds of political blogs. As a result, I'm getting a ton of broken links reported on Google Webmasters. I couldn't find any real support option on alltop.com, and when I log in, there are no sites for me to manage. Instead, I resubmitted the site with the correct feed address and in the comments, I mentioned the problem. All I got was a message saying the site was rejected. I believe because I already added the site. But I'm thinking they didn't pay attention to the comments. (In fact the message may have gone through an auto-filter considering how quickly it was rejected.) Is there a way to solve this? Is this a situation in which I would use the disavow tool? If All Top continues to create bad links, how do I stop the issue once and for all? Thanks!
Link Building | | eglove0 -
Best Blog Post Length to get Links
Okay, kind of silly question but i am looking for some help interpreting an analysis done by John Doherty almost a year ago: http://moz.com/blog/what-kind-of-content-gets-links-in-2012 In the document he mentions the correlation that longer posts on average receive more links but the graphs were really hard to interpret (for me). Based on the data what is the correct size we should shoot for (most graphs were missing labels). Any one have any insight? Should i shoot for 300 words per post, higher, etc? Thanks! Kyle
Link Building | | kchandler0 -
Link building
I keep sending personal emails to website asking for a link form them but every one says no how do other website get so many links to there website whats the best software to use
Link Building | | homesandindustrial0 -
Is there a software to help me check whether the sites that i give link to, also place my link on their site (reciprocal link)?
When i exchange links with others, i usually put their link on my site hoping that they'll do the same. Since it's impossible to check all sites whose link i have placed on my page to see if they have put a link back to me, i was wondering whether there is a kind of software to help me do that!
Link Building | | isidora0 -
Total Links vs Ext. Followed Links
Hi I'm fairly new to SEO and SEOMOZ. I've created a campaign for my own site and I've added 3 competitor sites. There are 1,385 total links to my site and a massive 49,450 links to one of my competitor's site. However under "Ext. Followed Links", there are 1,045 to my site and only 911 to the same competitor site. Am I correct that it is the "Ext. Followed Links" which are more important from an SEO point of view as the other links have the "no follow" attribute set? Or have I got this wrong? Thanks James
Link Building | | avecsys0