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
-
How to Diminish the spam score of the site?
I AM HERE TO DISCUSS MY PROBLEM AFTER THE GOOGLE CORE UPDATE OF OCTOBER MONTH MY WEBSITE SPAM SCORE IS INCREASING RAPIDLY HOW TO CONTROL THIS PROBLEM PLEASE HELP ME ASAP MY WEBSITE NAME IS EGYPT DIRECT
Link Building | | aprase1 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
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 -
How relevant are citations to SEO?
'How much do citations help your seo in view of the direction that google seems to be headed where content is king? Should the citations not be relevant to your site?'.
Link Building | | arthureray0 -
Should I Use a Backlink Plugin
One of my clients recently asked me if he should use a Wordpress plugin to create backlinks to his website. He mentioned WP-Syndicator as an example. I just redesigned his website and I'd like to ensure that he gets a bit more traffic than he was before. Should I suggest that he purchase/use a Wordpress backlink plugin? If so does anyone know which is the best one? Not sure if it's necessary, but here is the website I'm referring to http://intouchhome.com
Link Building | | eddie_olivas0 -
Web2.0 and private sites backlinks loop hole
Let suppose i have one target page i.e video and one web2.0 blog or wordpress blog. If i keep on adding new articles on web2.0 and in each article i add one back link(with different anchor text) to my same target page. Is this create red flag in google as i will be using one domain? Do I need to keep my web2.0 like bloggers.com and weebly or wordpress blogs relevant to one topic to increase the relevancy score. If i try to keep them relevant my back links to target pages from one domain increases again. I kind of stuck up in this loop help me out!
Link Building | | Sajiali0 -
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 -
Does the complete url count as backlink?
Hi there, does the http://mysite.com count as a backlink if posted on a site? I post a press releae and the site only allows me to put urls like this. they get something or must be in anchor the url? Thanks
Link Building | | nyanainc0