Bad Link Profile

[Avano Ltd]

Hello everyone

I am after a bit of advice regarding very poor link profile back to my site, we believe our site under previous owners had been hit by overly zealous competitors, we have massive incoming links from China, Russia and the Czech Republic, the extent is rather extensive and exceeds 2000ish links which obviously would be impossible to contact, my domain is now on a secure server so the URL is different to the previous incarnation so would I be able to work through a solution using a redirect?

thanks in advance.

 

[Adam H]

Is it a site that's previously hacked and SEO spam being flooded on to it, or shoddy link building / negative SEO ?. Makes a big difference to how you would deal with the clean up.

Is it the root domain where the links are pointing to or a subfolder ?

 

[martin-s]

Do you have evidence that the site is actually being penalised? If not, why worry? Google will ignore a lot of crap automatically.

Assuming it is penalised, does the site also have a decent number of good inbound links? (PM me the domain and I'll check Majestic for you)

If so it might be worth trying to save it. If not, dump it and start on a new domain. The switch to https on the same hostname might not be enough to distance you, even if you don't 301 the old urls.

And if you aren't going to 301, you'd be better off starting with a fresh domain to be sure (you'd have nothing else to lose)

What have you tried so far? Have you disavowed the bad links in Search Console? (Presume you have the site set up in there?)

 

[Avano Ltd]

Is it a site that's previously hacked and SEO spam being flooded on to it, or shoddy link building / negative SEO ?. Makes a big difference to how you would deal with the clean up.

Is it the root domain where the links are pointing to or a subfolder ?

no, we actually believe it to be bad blood and all links are from the same time we left the market leader, proving it could be challenging.
all links are to our root domain (http) even though we currently use a secure server, in google webmaster we have all URL's listed with https priority.

 

[mat]

My opinion...

- Moving your site over to https probably will not help with this issue regarding links as Google has become advanced at taking a http to https into account without necessarily needing a 301 redirect or canonical tag. Google are promoting the move to secure server and in my opinion they know how many people will not 301 etc, so factor this in when it comes to counting the existing links over. After all the actual domain name stays the same.

- You state you are aware the amount of links, so can you not export these (or at least the bulk of them) into a list and upload as a disavow file all at domain level. I also wonder how many of these links are from different domain names? If you have 2000 links but they are from a hundred or so domains may make your life easier with the disavow.

ANYWAY...

- From my own experience since the last penguin update, Google no longer automatically negatively impact your site based on existing bad links (If they ever really did) but instead simply ignore them. You may even find that the bulk of bad links slip through the net and count positively towards your site. I think the idea of negative seo by spamming someone’s site with dodgy anchor text links from crap sites is all a bit wishful, but doesn't really cause any impact.

 

[Avano Ltd]

Do you have evidence that the site is actually being penalised? If not, why worry? Google will ignore a lot of crap automatically.

Assuming it is penalised, does the site also have a decent number of good inbound links? (PM me the domain and I'll check Majestic for you)

If so it might be worth trying to save it. If not, dump it and start on a new domain. The switch to https on the same hostname might not be enough to distance you, even if you don't 301 the old urls.

And if you aren't going to 301, you'd be better off starting with a fresh domain to be sure (you'd have nothing else to lose)

What have you tried so far? Have you disavowed the bad links in Search Console? (Presume you have the site set up in there?)

yes we currently have webmaster tools with all variations of the URL active with a redirect to https, some bad links are shown in google search console, and we have a particularly bad spam score.

 

[Blossom]

It's not impossible to contact 2000 links, even 2000 unique domains. I've done clean ups of 100,000 before. For a number as low as 2000, just scrape contact info, create a template email and send it out/have a virtual assistant do it. Send a follow up email a week later from sites you haven't heard from. Track everything - dates contacted and dates followed up - in a spreadsheet.

Do the disavows for ones you haven't heard from after that time.

Don't forget to keep consistently building high quality, low spam score backlinks to dilute the spammy effect as well.

Even if the site isn't being penalised now, it doesn't mean it won't be in the future. It can also put potential partnerships and marketing/promo opportunities off, and the more diligent/paranoid visitors/customers.