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What do you do if your backlink profile is spammy?

by ksummers
14 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Some of my sites got hit by penguin. I didn't get a manual action against them, or receive any warnings from google, but their traffic significantly decreased the day the penguin update was released and has stayed low.

The problem is my backlink profile is terrible. I'll admit it, I bought links. Profile links,blog comments,badly spun article links.

What do I do now? :confused: Use the disavow tool? Or start building google friendly backlinks in the hope that they outweigh the bad.

One site has 6,000 spammy backlinks! Others have 300 so maybe some are recoverable?

Thank you for your help
#backlink #backlinks #profile #profile links #spam links #spammy
  • Profile picture of the author online only
    Just dump the site and start building new one. But this time avoid shitty links

    For real, even when your "penalty" gets lifted you just don't have any legit links and you'll be ranking nowhere on Google.
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    • Profile picture of the author Simon Farmer
      Originally Posted by online only View Post

      Just dump the site and start building new one. But this time avoid shitty links

      For real, even when your "penalty" gets lifted you just don't have any legit links and you'll be ranking nowhere on Google.
      I agree with the above quote. From experience the best option is just to dump the site and start a new one.

      I would not just copy and paste your old content over to the new site. I would re-write the old content so everything is fresh.

      In my experience if you're just re-writing content then you can get it done quickly because you basically know what you're going to write anyway.

      Of course I'm assuming you don't have a 1000 page site.

      Wish you the best of luck man.
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  • Profile picture of the author seekdefo
    Use ahrefs, majestic SEO anything to get a list of as many links that you have made and see what you can do about them. If the links are from wikis then the links can be edited. See how is the anchor text ratio. If there is 40% plus concentration of exact match anchor texts then try removing them. The site with 6k links will be a lot of work. A possible plan of action will be index all the links that have no anchor text and to build more of those. Now the next thing would be use Google disavow tool to remove those links which you cannot by any other method
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  • Profile picture of the author ContentWritingPhD
    Banned
    ksummers, if trying to "revive" your penalized site will cost you more time and money than building a new site, doing the latter is the best direction to go.

    I don't want to give a "sermon" or anything like that based on your situation right now. But, honestly, paid traffic and low-quality spun content oftentimes give "pain" than "gain".

    If budget is a concerning factor in order to hire a ghostwriter, I'd recommend you to write your engaging content yourself. If you don't have a good knack on writing, save-up until you can afford to hire a writer who didn't just learn English some five days ago.

    I don't apply the backlinking strategy in my business' website. I just write engaging and intriguing content and share it to my business' social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+). I must admit that I don't get ranked on my keywords overnight but it's worth the wait (1 to 3 months) seeing your page on the first page of Google.

    I hope my strategy helps you.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by seekdefo View Post

      Use ahrefs, majestic SEO anything to get a list of as many links that you have made and see what you can do about them. If the links are from wikis then the links can be edited. See how is the anchor text ratio. If there is 40% plus concentration of exact match anchor texts then try removing them. The site with 6k links will be a lot of work. A possible plan of action will be index all the links that have no anchor text and to build more of those. Now the next thing would be use Google disavow tool to remove those links which you cannot by any other method

      I don't know why people keep harping on this anchor text ratio stuff. The percentage of his anchor text is not the problem. It's crappy links. You can use any ratio you want. They are still crappy links.
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  • Profile picture of the author seoace
    There's probably 2 ways to fix your backlink profile.

    1. Use the Google disavow tool (Moz.com's OSE, SEO Spyglass or any other backlink checking tool + Excel) will be your best friend here.

    2. Build "non-crappy" backlinks to even out the ratio of bad backlinks to good backlinks.
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  • Profile picture of the author ksummers
    Thank you for all the help and opinions. I've been using majestic SEO to get a full list of backlinks for the two main sites that were hit and I'm going to try and come up with a system for weeding out the bad apples.
    Lesson well learned when it comes to backlinking.
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    • Profile picture of the author online only
      Originally Posted by ksummers View Post

      Thank you for all the help and opinions. I've been using majestic SEO to get a full list of backlinks for the two main sites that were hit and I'm going to try and come up with a system for weeding out the bad apples.
      Lesson well learned when it comes to backlinking.
      Just a question.

      Do you even have (already) some legit links? If yes, what do you consider quality links?

      I'm pretty sure that it's much easier to dump the whole site, move the content to another domain and start from zero. But this time avoid bad links and only use e-mailing/relationship and other "clever" tactics to get editorial links.
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  • Profile picture of the author andishm
    Originally Posted by ksummers View Post

    Some of my sites got hit by penguin. I didn't get a manual action against them, or receive any warnings from google, but their traffic significantly decreased the day the penguin update was released and has stayed low.
    Thank you for your help
    If you didnot got a manual penalty i will recommend you to use Disavow tool Matt Cutt himself said i watched in some video that disavow tool can help in penguin recovery....
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  • Profile picture of the author SoloSEOmurai
    This will be a learning experience for you :-(
    The site itself doesnt seem remotely recoverable from what you have just stated.
    Take the content to another site, start fresh.
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  • Profile picture of the author markhimeb
    what about duplicate content guys? Moving the contents of a site to another one will just get him banned for duplicate content
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    • Profile picture of the author micksss
      Originally Posted by markhimeb View Post

      what about duplicate content guys? Moving the contents of a site to another one will just get him banned for duplicate content
      If he completely removes his current site and puts up the same content on a new domain there should not be an issue of duplicate content.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    It must be a crap site If you built crap links on purpose. Dump it & don't make the same mistake on the next domain.
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  • Profile picture of the author markhimeb
    the content will keep being indexed by Google for some time. If he doesn't wait for this then all he will get is a penalized site that he won't be able to fix
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