• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. Research & Trends
        3. White Hat / Black Hat SEO
        4. Finding and Removing bad backlinks

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Finding and Removing bad backlinks

        White Hat / Black Hat SEO
        2
        4
        3067
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • k9byron
          k9byron last edited by

          Ok here goes.

          Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder.

          1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile.

          2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it?

          3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links?

          4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing?  My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed?

          I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake.

          Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • AlanBleiweiss
            AlanBleiweiss @k9byron last edited by

            Ah okay - that notice is definitely a factor then and an important consideration not initially mentioned.  So as long as you have someone else working on the other issues described then we can focus on the patterns concept I initially mentioned.

            Several things that stand out when I'm reviewing links on a mass scale.I prefer to look at links grouped by domain in the first pass to help see these patterns.

            1. Page titles of pages sending links.  Quite often, they're titles that blatantly scream junk/low-quality or irrelevant to any topic your site is about, or even link-partnerships... or even outright mention SEO.

            2. Domain names/URLs of pages sending links. Same concept - they can quite often obviously communicate that they're junk, irrelevant, or blatantly specifically sites for SEO or links.

            3. Anchor Text - if you group by anchor text as a next pass, look for links where the anchor text is exact match keywords and then look at the page title of that linking page and it's domain name.  Patterns can be spotted of low quality.  If needed, you can click over to a URL and just look at the page that  link is coming from.

            4. After all that process, as you have marked links as being bad, regroup them by domain.  At that point you will likely still need to go through remaining links and go to at least one link from each domain to examine the page or just look at the overall domain for quality.

            NOTE - the part where you examine a site sending links does require you to be able to know how to spot a bad site already.  Like - "Can I trust this site?" "Is this site obviously a fake site?" and other such questions need to be asked and answered.

            And if a link is on a good site, is it a forum or blog comment?  Is it using an SEO relevant keyword as the person's signature name? Or is it even a legitimate and relevant comment, even if the link isn't using keyword anchors?

            There are so many subtle indicators I could add but in reality the best way to go is to dive in and remember to look for patterns.  As you spend the time doing this work, patterns become more and more obvious...

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • k9byron
              k9byron @AlanBleiweiss last edited by

              We did receive a message from google about inorganic links. Also, our page speed right now has to do with us changing hosts. We know about those issues, and about our on site SEO problems. Like I said in my post, MY task is to try to make sure that I remove any links that may be hurting us, fix any broken ones and make sure that our link profile is as natural as can be. There are other people tasked with the issues you are talking about, I am just trying to get a handle on what I need to do.

              AlanBleiweiss 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • AlanBleiweiss
                AlanBleiweiss last edited by

                Evaluating links is a very time-consuming process.  You need to be able to look for "patterns" as a primary task IF you need to worry about links.

                HOWEVER

                I will also say this - your on-site SEO is suffering and just as likely or even MORE likely to be your primary problem. Why? Because you have not stated that you received a notice from Google informing you that your site was flagged for bad links.  If you did NOT get such a notice, while a poor overall link profile can certainly contribute to a generally declining ranking footprint, it's less likely to be the PRIMARY concern.

                For example:  Your "Accessories and batteries" category has a terrible topical focus. The page Title doesn't mention what they're accessories or batteries for.  Which means from the very first point of reference on-site, that page fails to communicate the refined focus of the category.  Accessories could be about ANYTHING. And so could batteries.

                Then, on that page, the header text "Accessories and Batteries" neither includes that topical clarification, nor is it even a proper "h1" header tag.  There's no descriptive paragraph based content on the page reinforcing and strengthening that topical focus.  Your Canonical tag is NOT SEO best practices for pagination in 2012, and thus that results in massive amounts of content within a category not properly being identified to further reinforce topical authority.  (You should instead be using rel-next/rel-prev and NOT using canonicalization on paginated content, every page title should be unique, and every page within a set should be properly reinforced with it's own h1 tag).

                You're not even close to having enough depth of content on product pages (one sentence for the "detailed description), so with all the "related" . product content, sidebar navigation and other "off-topic" content, there's a lot of content on your site deemed "thin" content.

                You have SEVERE page speed problems, a very serious SEO factor in 2012. (tools.pingdom.com reported a 9.3 second load time for the home page and URIValet.com reported 15 seconds).

                I haven't even begun to scratch the surface here, because you have a SERIOUS on-site SEO problem that you've apparently either failed to understand or chosen to ignore in this question, which indicates there could be MANY more problems on the site.

                Heck - several "minor" template fixes alone could boost your SEO, though if you really want to win, you'd be wise to really address all the high priority factors on-site.

                k9byron 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • denakalami

                  How to find Spam Website?

                  Hi guys, I'm seo newbie and really want to find websites that hurt  seo ranking to avoid get link. Which tools or trick can help me to find those site?

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | denakalami
                  0
                • 94501

                  Client Wants To Use A .io Domain Name - How Bad For Organic?

                  Hi, I have a U.S. client who is stuck on a name that he wants to get as a .io (British Indian Ocean) domain name for a new site. Aside from the user confusion/weirdness, how much harder do you think this makes this sites organic in the U.S. in the future with a .io domain name? FYI, the other part of the domain name he wants to use is short, meaningless and implies nothing in and of itself. Thanks!

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 94501
                  2
                • IsaCleanse

                  Good vs Bad Web directories

                  Hi this blog post Rand mentions a list of bad web directories - I asked couple of years ago if there is an updated list as some of these (Alive Directory for example) do not seem to be blacklisted anymore and are coming up in Google searches etc? It seems due to old age of the blog post (7 years ago ) the comments are not responded to. Would anyone be able to advise if which of these good directories to use? https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/what-makes-a-good-web-directory-and-why-google-penalized-dozens-of-bad-ones

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
                  0
                • carlystemmer

                  How/Why do I have so many Spam backlinks?

                  I was looking in GWT yesterday and found we have several thousand "spam" backlinks...I am curious why this happens and how this happens? There are some links from websites/domains that are not mine that appear to be spam. However, we own a large group of domains and have noticed some of the links are coming from 2 of those sites/domains we own to my main site. The sites/domains are not active, we just own them. I am wondering how someone could access these domains that are not active and create spammy backlinks to my main website? (They created about 20,000 links). Thanks.

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | carlystemmer
                  0
                • Patrick_G

                  Ever seen this tactic when trying to get rid of bad backlinks?

                  I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre. Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com. One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/... So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on. And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com. So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Patrick_G
                  0
                • WebServiceConsulting.com

                  Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?

                  My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com
                  1
                • Ryguy87

                  Are expired domains for Godaddy backlinks already reset by googel ?

                  When does Google actual reset backlinks to a domain. If i am buying expired domains from godaddy action for linking purpose am i wasting my time.Also if that the case whats the point of buying expired domains with many links pointing to them. If the backlinks to the expired domain still show up under my Google webmaster tool window does that mean Google counts that link?

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ryguy87
                  0
                • Casefun

                  Does having the same descrition for different products a bad thing the titles are all differnent but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?

                  does having the same description for different products a bad thing the titles are all different but but they are the same product but with different designs on them does this count as duplicate content?

                  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Casefun
                  1

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.