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.
Removing inbound links
-
How can I remove inbound links?
-
Thanks for the responses Guys!
The reason I wanted to know more about removing links was because a website that I look after had stopped receiving GA stats. I looked at the inbound links and found a few that where completely unrelated to the site (one from Japan and not translatable).
I did search for the Disavow tool from Google, but decided to try to contact the sites first to see if I can get the links removed that way.
On closer inspection, and much worry, I discovered that the GA tracking had stopped! How could that happen? As far as I know I am the only one with access to FTP... Worrying, but fixed now and I have had an education about the Disavow tool and link removal along the way
One more question: Are nofollow links harmful to a site if they are inbound?
-
Is this in response to a notice from Google or general house cleaning? And you need to asses if those links are actually causing you any harm in the first place, for example are they nofollow?
First step in removing links is always to try and contact the webmaster and ask them to remove the links. this is important as this will then impact on all Search engines, not just Google which would be the case if you automatically went for Disavow tool. It also provides you an audit trail if in future you find you need to demonstrate to search engines, say through a reconsideration request, that you have made an effort to clean up your site and comply with webmaster guidelines, To find contact details for a website you can try contact details on the site itself or look them up with tools such as the whois directory.
If contact fails, or if they demand money for removal then you should consider using Googles Disavow tool. Again please note this will only impact Google's algorithm. It should only really be a last resort however. You can access this through Webmaster tools, just search for disavow tool in the help section to the top right and follow the links,
-
Google Disavow, always good fun lol
I would suggest that you ensure that this is required before going down this path.... it is very time consuming, can negatively effect your current rankings, and is often not required!
-
Before using Disavow you will need to make a concerted effort to manually have the links removed. A good tool to coordinate this would be Rmoov. I would use Disavow as the last thing, if all else fails.
-
Use Google's disavow tool - detailed description here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
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 Long Do The Link Tracking Lists Take To Update?
Hi, How long do the link tracking lists take to update? It's been over a week and each is still showing a red cross. The reason I created it was because I migrated to a new domain name and Moz is still showing the backlinks on the old property and not the new (the domain swap happened in December 2020). I can see that Ahrefs has picked up all of the links - Both new and redirected - but Moz has not. When will this be reflected in Moz as it has already been over three months? Is there a reason for the above questions? I appreciate any response here. 🙂
Moz Pro | | Smarter_Finances3 -
Tumblr and Link Equity
Hi Moz Community, I've recently decided to start a project where I gather 1,000 great examples of something that's searched for often, and am thinking that posting it to a Tumblr site like the following website did could be a great way to pass link equity back to my main site (with a little "site by [my site]" somewhere in the header or footer). While I was super pumped about this idea today, and have now gathered almost 500 of my examples (mentioned above), I am not seeing link equity passed from this site, even on the non-redirected links here: http://gothamlogos.tumblr.com/ Anyone have any experience with projects like this? I've checked read the Moz Tumblr and SEO article from a few years ago, which makes it seem like this should be an SEO "win"... But using the Moz Pro account tools, I'm not seeing any of these non-redirect links (ordinary links) giving any value to anyone on this example site. Thanks so much in advance, Zack
Moz Pro | | Zack2 -
How to remove broken links from our wordpress site?
Hello! How are you? We just signed up to Moz.com. Moz link tool. It gave us many broken links with 404's and 302's. Could you please help me with deleting the links? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | hsma0 -
Why did my DA and Links go down?
How could I begin to research this to find out why we have less total links and a lower domain authority. Our DA has gone down two points and our total links dropped by a few thousand. I'd like to find out why that happened but I'm just not sure where to start. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Sika220 -
How to remove 404 pages wordpress
I used the crawl tool and it return a 404 error for several pages that I no longer have published in Wordpress. They must still be on the server somewhere? Do you know how to remove them? I think they are not a file on the server like an html file since Wordpress uses databases? I figure that getting rid of the 404 errors will improve SEO is this correct? Thanks, David
Moz Pro | | DJDavid0 -
Moz & Xenu Link Sleuth unable to crawl a website (403 error)
It could be that I am missing something really obvious however we are getting the following error when we try to use the Moz tool on a client website. (I have read through a few posts on 403 errors but none that appear to be the same problem as this) Moz Result Title 403 : Error Meta Description 403 Forbidden Meta Robots_Not present/empty_ Meta Refresh_Not present/empty_ Xenu Link Sleuth Result Broken links, ordered by link: error code: 403 (forbidden request), linked from page(s): Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Percentage of good links vs. bad
Hi Does anyone know the best way of determining good links from bad links using the SEO Moz tools? I bought some directory links to two or three pages on my site a few years back. The were all very obviously spammy because of the anchor text and I didn't have a high enough ratio of good links to counteract them. I read somewhere that if more than 10% of the links to a page have the same (or similar) anchor text, it's obvious that you're on the bad list.
Moz Pro | | nsjadmin0 -
How can I reduce the number of links on a page and keep the site easy to navigate?
The SEOmoz Site Crawl indicates that we have too many on page links on over 9,970 pages. This is an ecommerce site with a large number of categories. I have a couple of questions regarding this issue: How important is the "too many on page links" factor to SEO? What are some methods of reducing the number of links when there are a large number of categories? We have main categories with dropdown menus currently and have found that they are used to browse and shop the store.
Moz Pro | | afmaury1