danailo
Supreme Member
- Apr 1, 2011
- 1,209
- 778
In the recent spate of Google's anti "easy" link updates, also known as Penguin , link removal has become an essential part of SEO.
There are many reasons to remove a link:
To be honest there isn't a hard and fast rule, but in the last few months, I have worked on isolating a few factors when looking at a sites backlink profile, and I normally begin by isolating and classifying links into some predefined sets, and the higher the overlap, the more time I spend on those link removals:
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- The link was OK when you got it, but is now "toxic" due to the siteowner allowing too much spam, paid posting, or even by default of the site being hacked and injected with non-safe content
- Directories were great at one point to increase the low end volume of a sites link profile, and one could argue that they didn't add much value, however I believe they did, especially varying anchor text, building branded anchor text, and as a necessary "noise" in the link profile. However they were abused and the latest round of Penguin have actively targeted "Made for SEO" directories. We have seen thousands being deindexed.
- You bought links. Needs no explanation except that you have been caught. You need to remove them .
- You got hit by a negative attack. It used to happen before, but now that the genie is out of the bag, everyone seems to see negative attacks happening.
- You over optimised your anchor text - the last Penguin update definitely lowered the threshold for anchor optimisation - aggressive anchor links were hurt badly in some results we were tracking.
To be honest there isn't a hard and fast rule, but in the last few months, I have worked on isolating a few factors when looking at a sites backlink profile, and I normally begin by isolating and classifying links into some predefined sets, and the higher the overlap, the more time I spend on those link removals:
- Directories
- Pure Anchor Links
- Sites with a "Gray Bar" (ie. No page rank - note NOT PR 0, but PR non existent)
- Sitewide links
- Sites with an obvious "buy link" note
- Common IPs / C Classes
- Followed vs no followed links
- Links running through redirects (pass juice?)
- Is the anchor deserved and natural?
- The sites in the GrayBar, how long have they existed? If for over a year or so, and have no PR, then they would be suspect.
- What are the domain drop dates if any?
- Are there and "Buy links" notes on the site?
- Too many guest posts?
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