What do you do about your spammy links?

by 11 replies
13
A recent drop in ranking (again!) made me look more thoroughly at my backlinks.

Goodness, there is some junk in there: from Russian porn sites to numerous article sites that I never posted on.

I once read that no competitor could harm your site by posting spammy links to you but things seem to have changed. Now you always hear that it is those spammy links that is bringing your site down. What is your take on that?

What do you do with your spammy links?
Do you put them all into the google disavow tool? Or contact webmasters to take them down? (As if they would take hours to delete all your links - I think it is a waste of time to contact them.)

I also wonder what to do about the 150 articles on article sites I posted 2 years ago - whether I should delete them or leave them.

How do you keep track of your spammy links - do you check them every so often?
#search engine optimization #links #spammy
  • What do I do about my spammy links?

    I don't build them, so I don't do anything.

    People should have been doing the same.

    Paul
    • [3] replies
    • I don't build them either - but sometimes other people do.

      I've had a couple of occasions where we've published articles with links to the company/product that the article is about, then the site we've linked to has gone out and built crappy links to our article by submitting to junk bookmark sites like bookmark4you.com en masse.

      So you don't have to build bad links yourself in order to acquire them.

      My solution in these cases is to remove the article.

      Perhaps OP could try moving his pages with the spammy backlinks to new URLs on the same domain so that the original ones return a 404 - that should remove them from Google's link graph.

      Anyone else have any thoughts on this approach?

    • Well said... if you are trying to build a legit business why on earth risk getting slapped by using spammy backlinks?
      • [1] reply
    • The OP said "....sites I never posted on."
  • You can't really do much that's one downfall in having a blog
  • I contact the webmaster first. I follow with 3 e-mail sequences. First one is a 10 day notice. If they don't get back to me, I send another, and then one final notice. After that, boom. Disavow.
  • Hi Corinna

    The spammy links initially did help your site to rank. Now you're seeing a drop in the rankings because these links are discounted (or devalued). Matt Cutts says as much -- they're looking "up stream" to identify links that Google should not take into account when computing a site's ranking.

    I doubt that someone would bother linking to your site from their articles, and if they did, they must have been kicking themselves because those links initially helped you rank. Now that they may be discounted, your site is at the position it is because of all the remaining factors -- on-site and off-site -- that Google still uses to compute where your site belongs.

    My advice -- do nothing. If the links are already discounted, they're not harming you, they just don't help you rank like before. Removing them or disavowing them just tells Google that you agree with their decision to judge these links as spammy. It's not going to do anything to improve your ranking immediately.

    Some people say that "cleaning up your link profile" will help your site rank in the future. I question that opinion -- I've seen many sites recovering without disavowing, and I've never seen a site recover after disavowing.

  • If your analysis proved that a certain types of links is responsible for your
    drop in ranking the best thing you can do for yourself is to use the disavow tool.

    And also, if it can be pretty difficult to get affected by spammy links if
    you have been building a natural link from trusted domains.
  • Yes, in principle. But to be fair to the OP, what was OK once is now considered spammy according to google's webmaster guidelines, so people got caught dancing on a shifting floor
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