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
-
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
What happens to 301 redirect if the site taken down?
I understand 301 redirect carries over the page value to the page its being redirected to. However what happens if for example, I do a 301 redirect from example.com to example.co.uk, 2 months later I take down hosting and cancel domain for example.com, would I lose the page value that was being carried over to example.co.uk? Do I need to keep both domains active?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marvellous0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
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 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
OOPS!! My website links the most to me, I can't get it??
Today, I have checked Google webmaster tools to get answer of following question. Who links the most to my website? I was assumed that Google webmaster tools provide me list of external website where I have created my text links. But, I can't get it when see my own website links the most to me. (4652??) I checked my other websites which are integrated in Google webmaster tools. They also developed on same platform as well as same internal linking structure. But, I am not able to find out similar issue over there. That's why I am quite confuse with Vista Store. How can I solve it? Does it really matter? "Open Site Explorer is my favorite one and always using that to get it done. But, Google webmaster tools is also active & free so why should I not jump in to... 🙂 "
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
301 a page and then remove the 301
I have a real estate website that has a city hub page. All the homes for sale within a city are linked to from this hub page. Certain small cities may have one home on the market for a month and then not have any homes on the market for months or years. I call them "Ghost Cities". This problem happens across many cities at any point in time. The resulting city hub pages are left with little to no content. We are throwing around the idea of 301 redirecting these "Ghost City" pages to a page higher up in the hierarchy (Think state or county) until we get new homes for sale in the city. At that point we would remove the 301. Any thoughts on this strategy? Is it bad to turn 301s on and off like that? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisKolmar0