Getting Rid Of Spammy 301 Links From An Old Site
-
A relatively new site I'm working on has been hit really hard by Panda, due to over optimization of 301 external links which include exact keyword phrases, from an old site. Prior to the Panda update, all of these 301 redirects worked like a charm, but now all of these 301's from the old url are killing the new site, because all the hyper-text links include exact keyword matches. A couple weeks ago, I took the old site completely down, and removed the htaccess file, removing the 301's and in effect breaking all of these bad links. Consequently, if one were to type this old url, you'd be directed to the domain registrar, and not redirected to the new site. My hope is to eliminate most of the bad links, that are mostly on spammy sites, that aren't worth linking to. My thought is these links would eventually disappear from G.
My concern is that this might not work, because G won't re-index these links, because once they're indexed by G, they'll be there forever. My fear is causing me to conclude I should hedge my bets, and just disavow these sites using the disavow tool in WMT. IMO, the disavow tool is an action of last resort, because I don't want to call attention to myself, since this site doesn't have a manual penalty inflected on it. Any opinions or advise would be greatly appreciated.
-
A 401 is 'unauthorized' - is that the code it would produce, or a different error (or a typo!)?
That could work in theory - I'd be a bit hesitant about the extra step involved in 301ing to get to an error page on a different site. In general, the fewer steps you make Google go through, the better. This method would mean that your new site should not be "credited" with the bad links, however.
-
Matt-Antonio suggested I send the 301's to a different site, which I thought was very provocative, though a bit risky. Your suggestion of re-writing the 301 so it points to a non-existent page on the new site creating a 404, should work as well. Now if I combine both of your suggestions,...why not just send the 301's on the old site, to a non-existing page on the old site, letting the old site produce the 404?
-
I understand your concern, and in that light I would file the disavowal, but even very poor-quality, over-optimised links that point to your domain should not incur a penalty if the pages they link to are 404s or 410s. All the same, I obviously can't guarantee this so the disavowal would be a good move.
-
Thanks for the 404 advise, but I do think the drop is ranking is due to an automatic algorithm penalty that's the result of too many external links the have exact keyword matches to areas this site is competing in. For example the ratio "Free White Widgets" on external links, to the actual url and in site links is tripping this automatic penalty. By breaking these links, I how hope G will un-index, thus lowering the ratio.
-
Very provocative idea, Matt-Antonino, and that's certainly a creative option. What about if I just pinged all the old 301 links to the old url?
-
Hi there,
I'm going to disagree that this is a Panda issue unless those links + 301s were creating duplication, loops etc. on your site. If I'm reading this correctly, your problem is links from bad sites pointing to your site, albeit through 301 redirects - Panda deals with on-site issues and Penguin / manual penalties with off-site. Is this the issue, or are there on-site issues that this has created? Keep in mind that a drop in rankings that coincides with a Panda update isn't necessarily because of the Panda update.
As far as removing the effects of the bad links goes, sending bad-quality inbound links to 404 or 410 pages should remove them from consideration as far as Google's view of your backlink profile is concerned. That is, an inbound link pointing to yoursite.com/page.html where /page.html returns a 404 or 410 should ensure that that link doesn't hurt you. If, however, you are still concerned, go ahead and submit a disavow file with these links included.
-
I'm going to suggest something a bit unusual but I like to think outside the box.
-
Put the 301s back in place - but to another site.
-
Get those 301s indexed and
-
ping the crap out of them (try pingfarm.com) and then once they go to the new site (and google sees that) they'll be off the good site. At that point you can do whatever with the 301s - let them go. Just point them to a random tumblr site or something for now.
-
-
You have 3 options for the website.
-
Do nothing and hope links go away.
-
Keep the 301s in place.
-
Disavow them.
You know Google has already spotted your site and hit it, so keeping the 301s isn't an option. Doing nothing has unknown results and hasn't worked for you so far. That only leaves one option, unless you want to start from scratch.
I'm of the mindset that Google sees it as cleaning things up. Just because you submit the disavow doesn't mean you created the need for it, so why would Google see it as a bad thing?
-
-
Thanks William. My concern is that too many of the links from the old domain were over optimized and contained too many keywords associated to the field I'm in, and are doing more harm than good. I have mixed filling about the disavow tool at this point because it sound too good to be true. I'm kind of suspicious G would let me choose the link I want to loose, but at the same time allow me to keep the ones I want.
-
If these domains are completely useless to you otherwise, disavowing will help remove the links from your link profile.
Disavow is no longer a last resort, it's part of the job. Sending in a disavow report isn't going to call attention to you: the spammy links and penalty are already doing a good job of that
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
-
Reasonable to Ask URL of Link from SEO Providing New Links before Link Activation?
My firm has hired an SEO to create links to our site. We asked the SEO to provide a list of domains that they are targeting for potential links. The SEO did not agree to this request on the grounds that the list is their unique intellectual property. Alternatively I asked the SEO to provide the URL that will be linking to our site before the link is activated. The SEO did not agree to this. However, they did say we could provide comments afterwards so they could tweak their efforts when the next 4-5 links are obtained next month. The SEO is adamant that the links will not be spam. For whatever it is worth the SEO was highly recommended. I am an end user; the owner and operator of a commercial real estate site, not an SEO or marketing professional. Is this protectiveness over process and data typical of link building providers? I want to be fair with the provider and hope I will be working with them a long time, however I want to ensure I receive high quality links. Should I be concerned? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?
Hi everyone, i´ll try to explain a situation is happening to me, i´m goint to try to explain the case (im writing the sites without links for explication purposes. Site 1: Adventurerooms Site 2: Adventureroomsmallorca Site 3: Adventureroomsmadrid (the new site) What happen is that at first there was only Adventurerooms and Adventureroomsmallorca, Adventurerooms was for Madrid and linked to the one in Mallorca too, was kind of giving the information for Madrid but in first page split with a link to Mallorca. In a new strategy we create Adventureroomsmadrid for Madrid, and leave Adventurerooms for Spain (with links to Adventureroomsmadrid and Adventureroomsmallorca. We redirect the info for Madrid in Adventurerooms to Adventureroomsmadrid with 301 redirections. We work during this 3 months in Adventureroomsmadrid making content in the blog, and improving (now Adventureroomsmadrid is Moz 15 (perhaps even more), and Adventurerooms is Moz 10. Surprising Adventurerooms is getting better in its search rankings, even when we took away content from it and even without working well. Adventureroomsmadrid is also improving but not as much as Adventurerooms (i know that is a new site, only 3 months), but Adventurerooms gets better results with no content and only DA of 10. I hope i´ve explain the case with my english so the question is: "Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?" Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webtematica0 -
Easiest Way to Balance Links Across Site?
I'm struggling to reach the last few spots for my client's main keyword, hovering around mid-page on the first SERP. I have continuously built more links to this page but have not seen a correlation in movement, until I finally realised that I have too high a ratio of links pointing to the home page relative to those pointing to other pages on the site, which doesn't look natural (stupidly, for the last year we have mainly only been trying to rank the home page). I already have links on most UK directories - since the links I need are really just safe links (they don't need to have power), can anyone suggest the best/cheapest source of link-building that I could use to point more links to other pages on the site, to balance the site's overall profile? A press release, perhaps? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Disavowing Links for Subcategory of Site
Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site? We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site. Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
Advice on Getting this site ranking?
Hi there I'm looking to optimise this site for SEO -> Gets about 3,000 visits per day but all from branded searches. Gets virtually no 'keyword searches' It's just a landing page at the moment. Would you recommend I integrate a blog with it, so we can start targeting more long tail keywords (free football game etc) Any thoughts/advice appreciated 🙂 Thanks Howard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HowardK0