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.
How can I block incoming links from a bad web site ?
-
Hello all,
We got a new client recently who had a warning from Google Webmasters tools for manual soft penalty. I did a lot of search and I found out one particular site that sounds roughly 100k links to one page and has been potentialy a high risk site.
I wish to block those links from coming in to my site but their webmaster is nowhere to be seen and I do not want to use the disavow tool.
Is there a way I can use code to our htaccess file or any other method?
Would appreciate anyone's immediate response.
Kind Regards
-
Hi Yiannis,
As far as I'm aware, there isn't really a way to "block" a link. The link is seen on the other site. Returning a 404 for the page being linked to doesn't change the fact that there are a 100K links from one site pointing at your site. The only options I'm aware of are to 1.) contact the owner of the website with the links and ask them to remove the links and 2.) if that doesn't work disavow the links.
I understand your hesitancy to use the disavow tool, but quite frankly, this is exactly what it is intended for.
If you feel comfortably with the links being there and think Google has already dealt with them, then do nothing, but if you want to do something about the links, you either have to get them removed or disavow them.
BTW - My understanding of the partial manual actions is that often times Google not only deals with the suspicious links (devaluing them), but they also penalize the pages/keywords they think you were attempting to manipulate. So, just because it was a partial action and not a full site action doesn't mean it's not effecting some of your rankings. It's just not going to affect all your rankings for all your pages.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Hi eyepaq and thanks for your reply, much appreciated
The reason I do not want to use the disavow tool is because
- Google sent on the message that "took targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole", meaning they took care of the problem 2) Ranking and traffic looking solid
- I have seen a lot of cases where people used it and lost rankings (some never recovered).
My thoughts were to block the spammy links and monitor if the traffic will be affected (which I doubt as it seems most of it is for branded searches). If then I face de-index, drops then use the disavow/reconsideration request.
What do you think?
-
Hi,
If you are talking about one or only a few sites then it's easy.
Just build a disavow file as there is no down side to that . The disavow with domain:domainname.com (not individual pages) and upload it via Web master Tools. After sumbiting the file - send a reconsideration request explaining the situation and mentioning the disavow file. You should be safe after that.
Alternatively - but to be honest I don't see the reason why not going with the first option - is to return a 404 if the referral is that domain.
Hope it helps.
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
-
Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?
Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?
Technical SEO | | Breemcc0 -
Why Can't Googlebot Fetch Its Own Map on Our Site?
I created a custom map using google maps creator and I embedded it on our site. However, when I ran the fetch and render through Search Console, it said it was blocked by our robots.txt file. I read in the Search Console Help section that: 'For resources blocked by robots.txt files that you don't own, reach out to the resource site owners and ask them to unblock those resources to Googlebot." I did not setup our robtos.txt file. However, I can't imagine it would be setup to block google from crawling a map. i will look into that, but before I go messing with it (since I'm not familiar with it) does google automatically block their maps from their own googlebot? Has anyone encountered this before? Here is what the robot.txt file says in Search Console: User-agent: * Allow: /maps/api/js? Allow: /maps/api/js/DirectionsService.Route Allow: /maps/api/js/DistanceMatrixService.GetDistanceMatrix Allow: /maps/api/js/ElevationService.GetElevationForLine Allow: /maps/api/js/GeocodeService.Search Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetFeature Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetOverlays Allow: /maps/api/js/LayersService.GetFeature Disallow: / Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Self Referencing Links - Good or Bad?
As an agency we get quite a few of our clients come to us saying "Ooo, this company just contacted me saying they've run an SEO report on my site and we need to improve on these following things" We had one come through the other day that had reported on something we had not seen in any others before. They called them self-referencing links and marked it as a point of action should be taken. They had stated that 100% of the pages on our clients website had self-referencing links. The definition of self-referencing is when there is a link on a page that is linking to the page you are currently on. So for example you're on the home page and there is a link in the nav bar at the top that says "Home" with a link to the home page, the page you are already currently on. Is it bad practice? And if so can we do anything about it as it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation. I have not heard anything about this before but I wanted to get confirmation before going back to our client and explaining. Thanks Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Can hotlinking images from multiple sites be bad for SEO?
Hi, There's a very similar question already being discussed here, but it deals with hotlinking from a single site that is owned by the same person. I'm interested whether hotlinking images from multiple sites can be bad for SEO. The issue is that one of our bloggers has been hotlinking all the images he uses, sometimes there are 3 or 4 images per blog from different domains. We know that hotlinking is frowned upon, but can it affect us in the SERPs? Thanks, James
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK0 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | PioneerServices0