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
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
-
Why site linking domain and backlink are differing.
My site https://www.planmymoment.com and Mobile version site https://www.planmymoment.com/?amp Why my desktop and mobile version site linking domain and backlink are differing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moz12pro0 -
Site architecture, inner link strategy and duplicate or thin content HELP :)
Ok, can I just say I love that Moz exists! I am still very new to this whole website stuff. I've had a site for about 2 years that I have re-designed several times. It has been published this entire time as I made changes but I am now ready to create amazing content for my niche. Trouble is my target audience is in a very focused niche and my site is really only about 1 topic - life insurance for military families. I'm a military spouse who happens to be an experience life insurance agent offering plans to active duty service members, their spouses as well as veterans and retirees. So really I have 3 niches within a niche. I'm REALLY struggling on how to set up my site architecture. My site is basically fresh so it's a good time to get it hammered down as best as possible with my limited knowledge. Might I also add this is a very competitive space. My competitors are big, established brands who offer life insurance along with unaffiliated, informational sites like military.com or the va benefits site. The people in my niche rarely actually search for life insurance because they think they are all set by the military. When they do search it's very short which is common as this niche lives in a world of acronyms. I'm going to have to get real creative to see if there are any long tail keywords I can use as supporting posts but I think my best route is to attempt to rank for the short one to three keyword phrases this niche looks for while searching. Given my expertise on the subject I am able to write long 1000-5000 content on the matter that will also point out some considerations my competitors dont really cover. My challenge is I cant see how this can be broken into sub topics without having thin supporting content. It's my understanding that I should create these in order to inner link and have a shot at ranking. In thinking about my topic I feel like the supporting posts can only be so long. Furthermore, my three niches within my small overall niche search for short but different keywords. Seems I am struggling to put it all into words. Let me stop here with a question - is it bad to have one category in a website? If not I feel like this would solve my dilemma in making a good site map and content plan. it is possible to split my main topic into 3 categories. I heard somewhere you shouldn't inner link posts from different categories. Problem is if I dont it's not ideal for the user experience as the topics really arent that different. Example a military member might be researching his/her own life insurance and be curious about his spouses coverage. In order to satisfy this user's experience and increase the time on my site I should link to where they can find more dept on their spouses coverage which would be in a different category. Is this still acceptable since it's really not a different subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insuretheheroes.com0 -
New site started ranking, lost ground after 301...?
Hi everyone. So we decided to re-brand a website starting with a fresh domain and fresh website (new everything). The first 4 weeks the site was performing really well and started bringing organic traffic for several targeted keywords (small amounts, but something). Around 5 weeks later, we decided to perform a 301 Redirect from an older site we had that really hadn't changed since 2007. As soon as we performed the 301, we started loosing ground on the keywords that were starting to perform. I may help to mention that we were targeting different keywords on the new site, versus the keywords/industry that were targeted on the older site... because we were focusing on another but similar industry. Now, 10 weeks later we are still not showing up for the keywords that we were starting to make headway on in the first four weeks of starting.... any ideas why? suggestions? The 301's were performed properly. We verified them, and we check Google WMT for any additional ones that may still be out there, but try to fix them as soon as possible. We have grown the site from just a few pages to over 60+ pages in the last 2 months with unique and fresh content targetting those keywords... Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
How should we 301 redirecting ecommerce microsite to our larger ecommmerce site? Should we?
We have several microsites (by microsite I mean sites that are basically top-level departments of our main ecommerce site. We continue to run these, without much support, and they do generate a few sales but we simply don't have the resources to grow them or manage them effectively. We have "kicked around" the idea of 301 redirecting them to our main ecommerce site with the idea that any additional SEO value would be greater than the few sales they currently generate. All products that are on our microsites can be found on our main ecommerce site, thus we can redirect products on our microsites to the exact product on our main site. How would you treat these sites? Would you 301 redirect them? If so, how would you do it? What would be some considerations if we decide to 301 redirect? Microsite example: http://www.drinkingstuff.com/ Main site: http://www.prankplace.com/ I would greatly appreciate any tidbits the community could provide us on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Istoresinc0 -
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Beastrip0 -
Changing links after 301 already in place: is it nessasary?
Hi:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
I'm in the process of making sure I have a single URL that gets all link juice for every page. As the first step, I'm implementing 301 redirects. My question is: After 301 redirect is in place will it still be necessary to update links on my site(s) that point to the old URLs. For example, I just 301-redirected mysite.com/folder/index.html to mysite.com/folder/ - and it works fine, but I still have many links on the same site and other sites that link to mysite.com/folder/index.html. Is it important to change those links to mysite.com/folder/ as well or could I just leave them as they are since the 301 is taking care of the redirect anyway.. I mean, I will probably change them in time, just to keep things tidy. But if it's important I would definitely do it sooner rather than later. Thank you in advance.0 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi I have a tool that I wish to give to sites, it allows the user to get an accurate idea of their credit score with out giving away any personal data and with out having a credit search done on their file. Due to the way the tool works and to make the implementation on other peoples sites as simple as possible the tool remains hosted by me and a one line piece of Javascript code just needs to be added to the code of the site wishing to use the tool. This code includes a link to my site to call the information from my server to allow the tool to show and work on the other site. My questions are: Could this cause a problem with Google as far as their link quality goes? - Are we forcing people to give us a backlink to use the tool? (in the eyes of Google) or will Google not be able to read the Javascript / will ignore the link for SEO purposes? Should I make the link in the code Nofollow? If I should make the link a Nofollow any tips on how to make the most of the opportunity from a link building or SEO point of view? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Is a 301 to a 301 ok?
I have a site that has a lot of url differences. Due to coding we sometimes have to 301 to a page that is 301'd to another. Is there any danger in doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0