Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
-
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist.
There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file?
Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not?
Hope Im making sense
-
Sounds a plan. Thanks for your help bud, much appreciated.
-
My take, I'll just go ahead and start doing other things to improve it's current rankings. I could assign someone to go over links if another team member is available.
If I see improvements, within the next month, then that's a good sign already that you should continue and not worry about the dead links.
It takes google a long time to actually forget about those links pointing to your site. So if they are dead AND then you didnt notice any increases or drops in analytics, then they are pretty much ineffective so they shouldnt be a major obstacle. I think someone coined a term for it, ghost links or something. LOL.
-
Hi. I did go through GA several years back, think back to 2011, but didn't really see dramatic changes in traffic other than a general trend of just low organic traffic throughout. Keep in mind that it's an engineering site, so no thousands of visit per day... the keywords that are important for the site get below 1000 searcher per month (data from the days when Google Keyword Tool shared this info with us mortals).
That said, I do notice in roughly 60% of the links absolutely no regard for anchors, so some are www.domain.com/index.php, Company Name, some are Visit Site, some are Website etc. Some anchors are entire generic sentences like "your company provided great service, your entire team should be commended blah blah blah". And there are tons of backlinks from http://jennifers.tempdomainname.com...a domain that a weird animal as there's not much data on who they are, what they do and what the deal is with the domain name itself. Weird.
In all honesty, nothing in WMT or GA suggests that the site got hit by either Penguin or Panda....BUT, having a ton of links that originate from non-existing pages, pages with no thematic proximity to the client site, anchors that are as generic as "Great Service"...is it a plus to err on the side of caution and get them disavowed, or wait for a reason from Google and then do the link hygiene?
-
Hi Igor,
Seeing ezinearticles in there is definitely a red flag that tells you that it probably has web directories, article networks, blog networks, pliggs, guestbooks and other links from that time.
Maybe you can dig up some old analytics data, check out when the traffic dropped.
If you did not see any heavy anchor text usage, then the site must've gotten away with a sitewide penalty, I would assume it's just a few (or many, but not all) of the keywords that got hit so either way, youll need to clean up -> disavow the links if they are indeed like that. So that's probably a reason for it's low organic rankings.
That, and since it's old, it might have been affected by panda too.
-
Thanks for your response. Im about done with cleaning up the link list in very broad strokes, eliminating obvious poor quality links, so in a few hours I could have a big list for disavowing.
The site is very specific, mechanical engineering thing and they sell technology and consulting to GM, GE, Intel, Nasa... so backlinks from sites for rental properties and resorts do look shady....even if they do return a 200 status.
But...how vigilent is google now with all the Penguin updates about backlinks from non-related sites, and my client's site has tons of them? And if Majestic reports them to have zero trust flow, is there a benefit of having them at all?
Thanks.
-
Hi. Thanks for responding. WMT shows just a fraction of the links actually. about few thousand for the site that Majestic Historic reports 48k. But I dont have any notifications of issues. Im guessing that with all the Penguin updates most sites won't get any notifications and it's up to us SEO guys to figure out why rankings are so low.
About quality of the links, many do come from weird sites, and I've noticed ezinearticles too. Problem is that the 48k portfolio was built by non-seo experts and now, few years after the fact, Im stuck with a site that doesn't rank well and has no notifications in WMT. But can I take the lack of notification as evidence that the site has no backlinks problem, or do I read-in the problem in poor organic ranking?
-
If I would be in that similar situation I would not really care about it but if it didn’t took too much of my time, I would have included all of these in the disavow file too.
But if the page is not giving a 200 status, this shouldn’t really be a problem.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Igor,
Do they still show up in Webmaster tools? Do you have a penalty because of those links that used to link to the site? If not then I wouldn't really worry about it and just prioritize other things and make that a side task.
Are the majority of them on bad looking domains? If you checked the link URL on archive.org, were they spammy links? Then go ahead and include them in the disavow list.
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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Webmaster tools Hentry showing pages that don't exist
In Webmaster Tools I have a ton of pages listed under Structured Data >> Hentry. These pages are not on my website and I don't know where they are coming from. I redid the site for someone and perhaps they are from the old site. How do I find and delete these? Thank you Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Different links to ultimately the same page on Magento
Hi Everyone, I'm wondering if some of you could help me out a bit here as I'm a bit consfused. If you please take a quick look at my site: https://tesorotiles.co.uk the way it's setup is that you can get to the same page via 3 or 4 different routes as below: https://tesorotiles.co.uk/type/wall-tiles/rho https://tesorotiles.co.uk/by-area/bathroom-tiles/rho https://tesorotiles.co.uk/collections/rho These 3 are the exact same page and we've done it this way to make sure there is no break in the breadcrumb. Is this ok SEO wise or anyone have any recommendation. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | VIVO0 -
How much domain authority is passed on through a link from a page with low authority?
Hello, Let's say that there is a link to site A from site B. The domain authority of site B is 85, but the link is on a page that has a page authority of only 1. Does much authority get passed along from site B to site A? (Let's assume site A has a domain authority of 35, if that's relevant.) Thank you!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Linking to AND canonicalizing to a page?
I am using cross domain rel=canonical to a page that is very similar to mine. I feel the page adds value to my site so I want users to go to it, but I ultimately want them to go to the page I'm canonicalizing to. So I am linking to that page as well. Anyone foresee any issues with doing this? And/or have other suggestions? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Webmaster Tools Manual Actions - Should I Disavow Spammy Links??
My website has a manual action against it in webmaster tools stating; Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole I have checked the link profile of my site and there are over 4,000 spammy links from one particular website which I am guessing this manual action refers to. There is no way that I will be able to get these links removed so should I be using Google's Disavow Tool or is there no need? Any ideas would be appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Web page is showing up on Google but doesn't show when it was cached, so is it indexed?
Hey everyone So I created a new page on a WordPress website, it was live for a few hours till I changed my mind & switched it back to a draft. Just out of curiosity I did the Site:www.example.com/Example search on Google to see if it had been indexed & apparently it had but when I click on cached to see what time it got indexed at exactly it's showing me an error. So does this mean it is indexed or not?
Technical SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Inter-link Optimization for Pages
Hi Guys, How much interlinking is okay for between pages? Can i start link my internal pages like Wikipedia does? 20,30 interlink per page? OR is it all depends on Page Authority? Can i go inter-link crazy on 1 year old legitimate site? Big Thanks?
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0