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 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 -
Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
Hi, One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month. We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page. Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from. Thanks! ....Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Any success stories after removing excessive cross domain linking?
Hi, I found some excessive cross domain linking from a separate blog to the main company website. It sounds like best practice is to cut back on this, but I don't have any proof of this. I'm cautious about cutting off existing links; we removed two redundant domains that had a huge number of links pointing to the main site almost 1 year ago, but didn't see any correlated improvement in rankings or traffic per se. Hoping some people can share a success story after pruning off excessive cross linking either for their own website or for a client's. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ntcma0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is it a bad idea to have a "press" page and link to press mentions of our company?
We've recently been getting quite a bit of press. Would it be wise to create a "press" page and link to mentions of us or would this devalue the links on the press pages as Google may think they reciprocal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JenniferDacosta0 -
Link Building for "State" informational pages
I have a webpage for all 50 states for specific info relating to relocation and was wondering if there are any recommended links to work at getting for these pages. I would like to do "state" specific and possibly health related links for each page to help in the SEO rankings. I can see that if I just wanted to get 10 links on each page that is going to be 500 links I have to build and it is going to be very time consuming but I feel it is necessary. Thank you, Poo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
How Can Low Quality Links Be Removed?
Let's say that in looking in OSE that you find an overall low quality link profile. Let's say that some of those links were acquired by using article marketing systems like UAW or SEO Link Vine, which were hard hit in Penguin. Let's also say that some keywords were targeted within blog networks that passed a lot of page rank to targeted pages. Let's say that at one point in time an offshore link building team was used and they posted low quality blog comments on pages with hundreds of outbound links. Let's say as a result of the drop in SERPS that you've finally been convinced that there must be a better way and in the process join SEO Moz - and now you want to clean up the low quality link profile. How does one go about removing links on such a diverse number of sites? Are there best practices for how to remove links you longer want pointed to your site? Or is it simply best to go on about the work of building a lot of quality links and let the past be in the past? Thanks for your input Mozzers...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sdennison0 -
Correcting an unnatural link profile
A site I work with ranked page 1 for a competitive keyphrase until recently. (Not Panda-related as far as we can tell.) We've done extensive on-site tweaking and the page is still parked at 27-32 in the SERPs. We believe the only viable explanation at this point is an unnatural link profile. Over the course of several years the site has racked up a large collection of footer links with anchor text due to business relationships with the sites in question. So the profile is now skewed, with the result as follows: 100,000 domain links (top 10 competitors range 1800-50k) 87% anchor text optimized (competitors 0-41%) 99% follow links (competitors 85-100%) The vast majority of links are footer links We're working on creating more natural, high-value links but this of course takes time. In the short term, two questions: Should we aim to remove or change some of the footer links? If so, do we remove them, or just change anchor text? How many? How many new links should we pursue each month to make a meaningful impact on the profile without being too aggressive? Any other thoughts on how to fix this are also appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdcomms0