"Bad" backlinks
-
Hello dear community,
I am new here and quite new to SEO. Perhaps someone could give me a hint on a following question:
Which tools can help me to track "bad" baclinks, e. g. links which would rather downgrade my SEO performance?
-
Thanks for your replies! Gee, I thought things are easier
@ Marie no I havent got a google warning nor were my search results downgraded by penguin update.
After talking with a few SEO companies and receiving astronomical offers I have decided to keep trying myself.
A am currently doing a lot of different activities and after on-page optimizing am trying to improve backlinking.
I have reached great results over the last few week, but I am constantly thinking that I might make some dummy mistakes Since I have heard that google is downgrading or even punishing sites with backlinks it considers bad, I thought there might be an eays way to check it before problems occur.@Tom Thanks, I have found LinkDetox just before posting my question here and have just tried it out. Something sort of I have meant with my question. Unfortunately, for a buck it doesn't provide a full information.
@Irving Thanks, an interesting tool. Checking every single domain linking to me should be quite time consuming. Strange that the engine would report "essex" positive - I hope that google itself is not that stupid.
-
I ran a LinkDetox report and it found 61 toxic back links and 960 suspicious back links to www.audiobooksonline.com. We have NOT received any messages from Google WMT about bad links.
According to the report I should immediately get rid of the 61 toxic links. Can our robots.txt file be used to disallow these links?
Although NOT included in the LinkDetox report, Google WMT shows 30,198 back links from wn.com. Google Analytics shows we have received no visitors from wn.com (1/1/2012 - 1/25/2013). I have no idea why wn.com would be linking to us. What benefit do they get?
-
At the risk of sounding cliche, I would say that the best tool I use is my brain.
Any automated tool is going to have some false negatives and false positives.
I think the answer to your question though lies in why you are going through this type of audit.
If you've got an unnatural links warning then you've got to take every link that even smells slightly unnatural and toss it.
If you think you've been affected by Penguin (organic traffic drop that coincides with Apr 24, May 25 or Oct 5) then go after links that you have made using keyword anchor text.
If you're just trying to clean things up, then it's debatable on what to do. If you prune a bunch of links you could do more harm than good. I would start by looking at anchor text abuse and remove some of those links. But I think it's impossible to give general advice on what to do for your site without knowing how you have done SEO in the past.
If you've never engaged in link building but have naturally earned links to your site then I wouldn't even bother trying to clean things up. Even the whitest of white sites will have a few spammy links. But if you didn't make them then I wouldn't worry about them.
-
here is a very handy tool.
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
it flags sites that are linked to on the site that is linking to you (you enter the URL of site that is linking to you)
you need to look through the links for false positives, because "essex" will trigger "sex" for instance.
-
A really good one to start off with is LinkDetox.
You can pay for a full crawl of your site's backlinks with a single tweet.
It will break your backlinks into three categories: toxic, suspicious and healthy. Healthy are obviously A-OK. Toxic are links from sites that have been deindexed - these are clear-cut "bad badlinks".
The suspicious links come in a variety of categories themselves, indicating why the tool thinks they are suspicious. Some links might be bad, but some might be OK. It's important, therefore, to read through the tool's reasoning for making it suspicious and see if you agree, as well as cross referencing it with some SEOMoz metrics such as PA/DA.
Hope you have fun with the tool - for the price of one tweet, I'd say it's definitely worth it.
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
-
Backlink and Citations: "Google my business" title name too long!?
Here is my situation.
Link Building | | H.M.N.
I am currently doing backlinks and citations for one of our clients. The title name of the client on "Google my Business" is 75 characters. However, for most citation or back link websites, the limit for the title is 50 characters. Here are my questions: How important is it to have the exact same title in citations and backlinks? If it is, is the only solution to change the name on google to have only 50 characters? Thanks in advance for your help!0 -
Backlink Building - is it worth it?
I've got a UK-based site with about 10,000 backlinks, according to majestic, and just 4 according to Open Site Explorer? Confusing! Rivals tend to have more - 28,000 in the case of our nearest competitors. So I'm not sure the best way to go about building backlinks? Or if it's worth actively seeking to build them? The index page of the site has a Moz PA of 45 (DA = 35) and I'm looking for any ways to increase these - need to get the DA up to 73 to compete with largest rivals. One of our main rivals has about 60 .edu links - would be great to emulate that, but I'm also not sure how you go about this? i.e. when you spot a good backlink someone else has, how would you begin the process of also getting that link?
Link Building | | abisti20 -
Backlink Disavow strategy
Hi, I would like to know what are the things to check when Disavow backlinks? Should we disavow all the low PR and DA backlinks ex: disavow all the backlinks under 4PR? Thanks alot !
Link Building | | bigrat950 -
Please let me know if I have bad backlinks...
I'm not sure of all the parameters in determining a quality backlink or not. The following is a link to my backlinks, can you please let me know what backlinks need to go now for SEO purples? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmifXCdkpTl5dEgyT1U3d2FHYUx6MUJxT0I3WVBDc0E Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | AutoGlassRescue0 -
My competitors all seem to use "junk" pages to rank / backlink, how to compete and not cheat
Hello, Page 1 of Google for the word "copier lease" and most other valuable copier leasing terms are dominated by the same 4-5 for organic (PPC too of course, but organic is what I want) They all use some SEO company, so when I go and look for good link oppertunities, most of the pages I find are just SEO companies who of couse would never be interested in a competitor's link. Examples: ajaxunion blogspot com or excellentpoly blogspot com and the list goes on, all just AjaxUnion "blog pages". blog homerenovationguide com /2011/06/15/repair-or-replace is just inhouse SEO making ranking pages for CostOwl. So, its hard NOT to want to throw up a blog farm and do as "the Romans do". What ideas do you all have to get backlinks in this market of Copier Leasing that would hold up. Thanks 6SW66.png 6SW66.png
Link Building | | einstein99992 -
"gimme links" = easy to fill out profile/personal reputation links that offer a do-follow anchor text flexible link
I'm doing some SEO for small niche service sites...and aside from niche directories and some light article marketing and local search directories (yelp, etc) there really isn't a budget for content generation. I really only have a budget for profile/submission links. What are some sites where you can quite easily fill out a personal profile with an anchor text variable link that may not be THAT juicy but will stick (i.e. not a spam/fake profile type of link, but something like Linkedin). I'll start with giving away 1 www.istockphoto.com Any others that aren't obvious?
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
Backlinks not showing
I have a website that is almost 2 months old and during this period I have built 477 links to my website.. however when I do a backlink check on Google.. link:mydomain.com, it says that there are no matches. How is it possible that none of my back links are indexed by Google?
Link Building | | b3pot6_gmail.com0