Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?
-
If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't. Is there any reason to remove them? If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.
-
Links that have been discounted do indeed factor into penalties. In fact, they're probably the links you want to remove FIRST because these are sites/pages that Google has already flagged. You should absolutely remove them, especially if you're under penalty of some sort.
Removing links is indeed a bit of a two-edged sword in that you often cut out some spam links that Google doesn't (yet) know about. That said, leaving the links in place is the poorer option in my view, as it prevents you from moving forward with a long-term strategy.
If all of your links are manipulative, it might be better just to start a new site rather than cleaning up to return to 0.
-
Again this issue has come up. Anyone with any insight into this:
-
If he has little-to-no natural, high authority links, changing to a new domain may be a better move.
-
Once again, it all comes down to "do you have real, natural, high quality links pointing to your site?" If you only have a couple, it may be easier to move domains and contact those link owners to point to new url. If you have many good links that would improve rankings, it may be easier to remove/disavow the bad links instead of getting all those links changed to point to new location.
-
Is it a bad idea for him to move the content to a new domain and be more careful about the links he acquires?
-
Thank you for the response. However, it's not what I'm looking for. I agree with the process my have mentioned for having penalty removed. However, I'm asking about this specific penalty:
Unnatural Links - Partial Match - affecting some links.
If Google has already discounted these links and my rankings dropped as a result. Is there any benefit to hiring a company for $1,000 to identify which links need to go and than pay $ per link to have them removed. Finally putting the rest in a disavow file and sending it into Google.
Say they do remove the "penalty" would it do any good. Did they discount the links AND hit my site with a penalty or did they just discount the links rendering having the "penalty" removed pointless.
-
Hi Beastrip,
In our opinion it wont make much difference for quit a while, however a ship shape website is what we should all strive for, and what Google likes most. If you were to put the hours of labor into correcting this issue the return on investment will disappoint you. So you should never let the problem get that bad, where you are being penalized in the first place. A clean ship will be handsomely rewarded, one that is in disrepair and neglected will not reach the same results, and will struggle to regain what it could have had if well maintained.
-
You should attempt to remove them and add them to disavow list. Then in the RR, mention what you've done to fix the penalty.
If your rankings are based mostly on the manipulated links, your rankings will drop hard (which is most often the case). Once the penalty is removed though, start working on obtaining natural links so you can return to ranking. If the page/domain has no natural links, it may be easier to just start fresh.
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
-
Can Google bypass an AJAX link?
On my company's events calendar page when you click an event, it populates and overlay using AJAX, and then the link that is populated in that overlay then takes you to the actual events page. I see this as a problem with Google because it can't follow the AJAX link to the true event page, so right now nothing on those pages is getting indexed and we can't utilize our schema to get events to populate in the Google rich snippets or the knowledge graph. Possible solutions I considered: 1. Remove the AJAX overlay and allow the link from the events calendar to go directly to the individual event. 2. Leave the AJAX overlay and try to get the individual event pages directly indexed in Google. Thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
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 -
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Can an "Event" in Structured Data For Google Be A Webinar?
I have a client who is has structured data for live business webinars. Google's documentation seems to talk more about music and tickets than this kind of thing. At the same time, we get an error in search console for "Name" and location, which they list as "webinar." Should I removed this failed structured data attempt or is there a way to fix it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Can Google read content/see links on subscription sites?
If an article is published on The Times (for example), can Google by-pass the subscription sign-in to read the content and index the links in the article? Example: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/property/overseas/article4245346.ece In the above article there is a link to the resort's website but you can't see this unless you subscribe. I checked the source code of the page with the subscription prompt present and the link isn't there. Is there a way that these sites deal with search engines differently to other user agents to allow the content to be crawled and indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
E Commerce site - removing discontinued items
We have been hit with a Panda penalty and the site has slowly been losing rankings since January, I've now realised that we have 4000+ page indexed in Google, but only 2000 live products. We have never deleted any of the pages with discontinued items, most of which were created when keyword stuffing and thin content reigned supreme - which explains the Panda penalty. But which is the best and quickest way to delete them from Google? We have already implemented a 'noindex' across all these pages, but as they are no longer in the 'crawlable' site, how will Google find them to know this? Would a 404 work any better - I'm not concerned about any link juice etc to/from these pages, I just want rid. I'm not sure if we can move all these pages into a dedicated directory which would allow us to use Google's Removal Tool - using it with the individual urls would be a mammoth task. Any advice would be most greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ElaineAllkids0 -
Large site rel=can or no-index?
Hi, A large site with tens of thousands of pages, but lots of the pages are very similar. The site is about training courses, and the url structure is something like: training-course/date/time I only really want the search engines to index the actual training course pages, which is the better option for me and why?: a) rel=canonical b) noindex, nofollow Thanks, Gary.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google. It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index. I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0