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.
Backlinks from non-relevant site
-
There's a forum I used to participate in that allows you to include a link to your website in your signature block. I have over 500 posts in the forum so that provides a lot of backlinks to my website.
However, I recently decided to remove my website link from my signature for two reasons:
-
The forum is 95-99% dead. Hardly anyone uses it anymore. BTW, the website that houses the forum is still popular within is niche (articles, etc). Just the forum appears to be dead.
-
The website and its forum really have no connection whatsoever to my business. I'm in a completely different niche.
However, I have no idea if I've made the right decision. Will removing my signature and the backlinks hurt my site? Or will it help it since the other site really isn't related to mine?
Thanks for any thoughts on this!
-
-
Thanks Travis, that's exactly what I wanted to know! The links are definitely gone from my forum posts so I assumed it was a crawl issue but wasn't 100% sure. Thanks again for all your help!!!
-
I really don't know how that forum handles sigs, so I can't say for certain. What you can do is check a handful of your old posts at random, if the sig is gone - the links are gone.
The problem with all link data, even Google Webmaster Tools, is that it's never up to date. Mozbot, Googlebot and all the various crawlers have to crawl the links to show us link data. It can take a while between removal and another crawl, so the answer is 'patience'.
-
Thanks Travis! That's kind of what I was thinking but wanted to make sure.
I have one other question. When I run site explorer on my website, those backlinks from the forum still show up even though I deleted the signature link about 10 days ago. Will these eventually go away on their own? Or do I need to actively remove them?
-
It could be seen as a link of little value for all of the reasons you stated. If your site had a vast preponderance of little but forum links that pass juice/equity with exact match anchor text, like 'buy nike shoes', you would be heading into a possible penalty. That would show intent toward manipulation.
So the short answer is: Removing the links isn't going to help your site, but if they're truly removed they aren't going to hurt your site.
There would be other things to consider, if the forum related to your business. Some things to consider are referrals and conversions from referrals. But since you stated that the forum is unrelated, I won't worry about that.
If you haven't read this yet, it's a good idea that you do. Staying within those guidelines, and avoiding anything in the grey will generally keep your site in good standing from a linking perspective.
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.
Related Questions
-
Backlinks and SPAM
I was doing some back link review of competitors and I have noticed that many of our competition have 300+ do follow back links from Justia.com and an additional 300+ do follow links from law.cornell.edu (they share the same database). The links on Justia are from different pages and they are all going to the root of our competitors site. So the questions are as follows; 1: For the purpose of SEO is this considered SPAM 2: If not SPAM, then does it have a positive effect on the competitions website and should I attempt to emulate for my client. Thanks in advance. -Jeff
Link Building | | FriedmanSimon10000 -
Backlinks from translated content
Hello, We have quite a few articles "out there" that give us backlinks. We were thinking of also translating the content and submitting it to local content websites, so it can provide us with more backlinks. The main questions here, will this content be recognized as the same content as the English version? Also, being in another language, some of the anchor text might not hit the English keyword. Not sure how Google sees it. Any advise on the matter? thx!!
Link Building | | PangeaLangs0 -
Rankings Dropped After New Backlinks.
I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google. Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values. Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?
Link Building | | poke11 -
Best Way to Filter Backlinks
When analyzing backlinks and trying to get the same one for another site there are a ton of backlinks to go through. I know that if the DA of the link is then pages on the site might be a good choice like adding an article or something of the sort to the site but as far a the same page goes you can typically only do this with a comment on the page. My question is, given a huge list of backlinks from multiple sites, is there an easy way to analyze the links and determine which ones I can copy without manually checking hundreds of links?
Link Building | | spyke010 -
Backlinks From Press Releases - Should I Disavow Them?
About 2 months ago, I published a press release through PRWEB with a link back to my website of course. Now it must have been one of those morning where the coffee wasn't strong enough as my website already has a Penguin penalty I'm trying to get lifted. The intent wasn't to spam the web but rather to gain some traction in the business hosting world. Like I've said, the coffee must've been too weak that morning as it didn't even cross my mind to see if I could "nofollow" the links in the press release. I just hit the submit button... As I'm in the process of submitting a disavow links request to Google, I'm wondering if I should include the URLs to copies of those press releases? I mean, there's no way I can find all those links as it was submitted not long ago. Google and link tools will keep discovering other copies of the PR for months to come probably.
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Will Google penalize for backlinks on non-indexed pages?
Have a client who has a bunch of links from spammy sites that aren't even indexed by Google. Will Google penalize (i.e. Penguin) for backlinks from spammy sites that aren't indexed? I'm guessing "Yes, Google still crawls non-indexed sites and may penalize the sites linked to from the banned site." Anyone have any data or experience with this? Anyone have a non-indexed or banned site? Does Google still crawl it?
Link Building | | AdamThompson0 -
What benefit does a site with a low DA get from someone guest posting who links to a site with a high DA?
I'm relatively new to link building and although this may be an obvious question I can't seem to find an answer anywhere even after searching Google.
Link Building | | JoshED0 -
Linking strategy between my own sites
Hi, I have one main site, let's call it food.com I also have 10 smaller sites, let's call them mexicanfood.com, indianfood.com, italianfood.com etc food.com is on its own separate dedicated server the 10 smaller sites are all on a shared IP in hostgator I don't want Google to think that I have created the 10 sites for only purpose of creating links to each other. So, would you recommend that all those 10 sites link to each other? or should there be no interlinking within those 10 same IP domains? What about linking from those 10 sites to my main site? How should I structure my own backlinks not to get penalized by Google ?
Link Building | | limens0
