Dealing with links to your domain that the previous owner set up

[mickburkesnr]

Hey everyone,

I rebranded my company at the end of last year from a name that was fairly unique but sounded like I cleaned headstones instead of building websites. I opted for a name that I liked, it reflected my heritage - however it also seems to be quite common.

Anyway, I registered the domain name as it was available as the previous owner's company had been wound up. It's only been in the last week or two where I've managed to have a website on that domain and I've been tracking it's progress through Moz, Google & Bing Webmaster tools. Both the webmaster tools are reporting back that my site triggers 404 errors for some specific links. However, I don't have or have never used those links before. I think the previous owner might have created the links before he went bust.

My question is in two parts. The first part is how do I find out what websites are linking to me with these broken URL's, and the second is will these 404'ing links affect my SEO?

Thanks!

[Supporting]

Removing 404 urls from Google indexes is a never ending job and often requires multiple submissions until they go away.

But when should you submitt them for removal?

If Moz finds them but Google is not reporting them yet in wemaster tools or Analytics...

should you be proactive and submit them to google for removal?
OR
Wait until the show up as an error by Google?

[mickburkesnr]

Hi Matt,

Yes they all are! I'm going through the responses now and trying out the suggestions.

[MattRoney]

Hey mickburkesnr!

Are any of these answers helpful?

[seoman10]

This is a common problem, you have three options:-

Attempt to get the links taken down (by contacting the Webmaster)
Use the Google Disavow Tool tool
Recreate content on the site

To do any of the above as you mentioned you will need a list of URLs to fix, I would recommend using Google Webmaster tools & Moz Open Site Explorer.

You can also use Google search engine and search for the following:-
"-site:yourdomain.com yourdomain.com"

Remove speech marks

Hope this helps.

[Travis_Bailey]

It's my opinion that the Gary Illyes quote is a little out of context for the situation. Dead inbound links (404 errors) could be a bad thing, if the links are of good quality. It's more than likely Mr. Illyes was addressing on-page 404s, and in that context I would mostly agree.

Though to be pedantic, 404 errors slow page load time - and speed is a ranking factor. So while broken on-page links may not result in a direct penalty, it definitely doesn't do any favors for on-page SEO.

[Travis_Bailey]

Before we get to the links:

Apologies in advance for all of this, but I know it can be helpful for your current situation and in the future.

The first thing that would have helped is using SEM Rush to possibly get an idea of the domain's ranking history. I say 'possibly', because it's not so great with domains/pages that geo target smaller cities. A site could be going gangbusters for Paducah, Kentucky targeted queries, and SEM Rush more than likely won't pick up on that. Major metros? Yea varily.

SEM Rush can also possibly help you determine if the site has been hit by various algorithm updates. Generally if a sharp drop in organic traffic occurs within, or shortly after, the same month of a spam related update there's a good chance the site has been penalized. If such is the case, it could more than likely hurt your efforts for some time.

In more competitive niches - penalties aren't always the case. Sometimes the competition is fierce and sites lose traffic to competitors at the time of algorithm updates. Use Moz's Google Algorithm Change History to help with those efforts.

There's also the possibility that whoever owned the domain previously made some pretty bad mistakes with their front end deployment. You can use Wayback Machine to possibly figure some of that out (you may even be able to grab a sitemap). Sometimes people/companies had enough rope to hang themselves, no algo or competition necessary.

Now... to the links!

The short answer to your second question is variable. You may have some really great links out there that are currently pointing to a dead page. On the other hand, you could have a ton of spam. So you can hurt your search engine optimization efforts through inaction or action. The rest of this is a general overview of what you should do.

It's always a good idea to get more than one source of link data. Always. Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer are all good 'free' sources of link data. I would also recommend Ahrefs and Majestic.

All of those sources will tell which page has received links, as well as the anchor text used. Ahrefs and Majestic in particular are pretty good at showing you which inbound links lead to a 404. From there, you can choose whether or not you want to 301 to a new page with comparable content.

Just make sure that you're not bringing in a whole lot of spam links, and be especially judicious about links with exact match anchor text. A boiler plate example would be 'keyword city'. The rest of your decisions should be based on Google Quality Guidelines with special attention paid to the Link Schemes section.

And should some of those linking domains not pass your judgement call, add them to your disavow file to be safe. You can disavow entire domains, so you're not bogged down in individual link entries. Just make sure to note that you had just purchased the domain, and the domain looked suspicious. Here's the official documentation for the disavow tool.

Best of luck, and I'm sure you'll have more questions. Feel free to post them here.

[Alick300]

Hi,

To check broken links/URLs (the http response ‘404 not found error’) on your website) you can use Screaming Frog SEO spider which is free in lite form, for up to 500 URLs.

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/broken-link-checker/

Gary Illyes from Google says "Whoever came up with the idea that having 404s gives a site any sort of penalty, you're wrong. Utterly wrong."

Please also read this post @ https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm

Hope this helps.

Thanks