• 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. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more

        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.

        Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more

        Technical SEO
        3
        9
        2445
        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.
        • IgorMateski
          IgorMateski last edited by

          Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist.

          There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file?

          Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not?

          Hope Im making sense 🙂

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • IgorMateski
            IgorMateski @DennisSeymour last edited by

            Sounds a plan. Thanks for your help bud, much appreciated.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • DennisSeymour
              DennisSeymour @IgorMateski last edited by

              My take, I'll just go ahead and start doing other things to improve it's current rankings. I could assign someone to go over links if another team member is available.

              If I see improvements, within the next month, then that's a good sign already that you should continue and not worry about the dead links.

              It takes google a long time to actually forget about those links pointing to your site. So if they are dead AND then you didnt notice any increases or drops in analytics, then they are pretty much ineffective so they shouldnt be a major obstacle. I think someone coined a term for it, ghost links or something. LOL.

              IgorMateski 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • IgorMateski
                IgorMateski @DennisSeymour last edited by

                Hi. I did go through GA several years back, think back to 2011, but didn't really see dramatic changes in traffic other than a general trend of just low organic traffic throughout. Keep in mind that it's an engineering site, so no thousands of visit per day... the keywords that are important for the site get below 1000 searcher per month (data from the days when Google Keyword Tool shared this info with us mortals).

                That said, I do notice in roughly 60% of the links absolutely no regard for anchors, so some are www.domain.com/index.php, Company Name, some are Visit Site, some are Website etc. Some anchors are entire generic sentences like "your company provided great service, your entire team should be commended blah blah blah". And there are tons of backlinks from http://jennifers.tempdomainname.com...a domain that a weird animal as there's not much data on who they are, what they do and what the deal is with the domain name itself. Weird.

                In all honesty, nothing in WMT or GA suggests that the site got hit by either Penguin or Panda....BUT, having a ton of links that originate from non-existing pages, pages with no thematic proximity to the client site, anchors that are as generic as "Great Service"...is it a plus to err on the side of caution and get them disavowed, or wait for a reason from Google and then do the link hygiene?

                DennisSeymour 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • DennisSeymour
                  DennisSeymour @IgorMateski last edited by

                  Hi Igor,

                  Seeing ezinearticles in there is definitely a red flag that tells you that it probably has web directories, article networks, blog networks, pliggs, guestbooks and other links from that time.

                  Maybe you can dig up some old analytics data, check out when the traffic dropped.

                  If you did not see any heavy anchor text usage, then the site must've gotten away with a sitewide penalty, I would assume it's just a few (or many, but not all) of the keywords that got hit so either way, youll need to clean up -> disavow the links if they are indeed like that. So that's probably a reason for it's low organic rankings.

                  That, and since it's old, it might have been affected by panda too.

                  IgorMateski 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • IgorMateski
                    IgorMateski @MoosaHemani last edited by

                    Thanks for your response. Im about done with cleaning up the link list in very broad strokes, eliminating obvious poor quality links, so in a few hours I could have a big list for disavowing.

                    The site is very specific, mechanical engineering thing and they sell technology and consulting to GM, GE, Intel, Nasa... so backlinks from sites for rental properties and resorts do look shady....even if they do return a 200 status.

                    But...how vigilent is google now with all the Penguin updates about backlinks from non-related sites, and my client's site has tons of them? And if Majestic reports them to have zero trust flow, is there a benefit of having them at all?

                    Thanks.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • IgorMateski
                      IgorMateski @DennisSeymour last edited by

                      Hi. Thanks for responding. WMT shows just a fraction of the links actually. about few thousand for the site that Majestic Historic reports 48k. But I dont have any notifications of issues. Im guessing that with all the Penguin updates most sites won't get any notifications and it's up to us SEO guys to figure out why rankings are so low.

                      About quality of the links, many do come from weird sites, and I've noticed ezinearticles too. Problem is that the 48k portfolio was built by non-seo experts and now, few years after the fact, Im stuck with a site that doesn't rank well and has no notifications in WMT. But can I take the lack of notification as evidence that the site has no backlinks problem, or do I read-in the problem in poor organic ranking?

                      DennisSeymour 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • MoosaHemani
                        MoosaHemani Banned last edited by

                        If I would be in that similar situation I would not really care about it but if it didn’t took too much of my time, I would have included all of these in the disavow file too.

                        But if the page is not giving a 200 status, this shouldn’t really be a problem.

                        Hope this helps!

                        IgorMateski 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -2
                        • DennisSeymour
                          DennisSeymour last edited by

                          Hi Igor,

                          Do they still show up in Webmaster tools? Do you have a penalty because of those links that used to link to the site? If not then I wouldn't really worry about it and just prioritize other things and make that a side task.

                          Are the majority of them on bad looking domains? If you checked the link URL on archive.org, were they spammy links? Then go ahead and include them in the disavow list.

                          IgorMateski 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • 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

                          • webbeemoz

                            I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?

                            seo consulting seo expert seo page treatment

                            Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
                            website.com/product1/pricing
                            website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks

                            Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
                            1
                          • ugorayan

                            My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP

                            Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers

                            Technical SEO | | ugorayan
                            0
                          • znotes

                            What's the best way to test Angular JS heavy page for SEO?

                            Hi Moz community, Our tech team has recently decided to try switching our product pages to be JavaScript dependent, this includes links, product descriptions and things like breadcrumbs in JS. Given my concerns, they will create a proof of concept with a few product pages in a QA environment so I can test the SEO implications of these changes. They are planning to use Angular 5 client side rendering without any prerendering. I suggested universal but they said the lift was too great, so we're testing to see if this works. I've read a lot of the articles in this guide to all things SEO and JS and am fairly confident in understanding when a site uses JS and how to troubleshoot to make sure everything is getting crawled and indexed. https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/javascript-seo-resources/ However, I am not sure I'll be able to test the QA pages since they aren't indexable and lives behind a login. I will be able to crawl the page using Screaming Frog but that's generally regarded as what a crawler should be able to crawl and not really what Googlebot will actually be able to crawl and index. Any thoughts on this, is this concern valid? Thanks!

                            Technical SEO | | znotes
                            0
                          • agencepicnic

                            Finding websites that don't have meta descriptions

                            Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian

                            Technical SEO | | agencepicnic
                            0
                          • Cocoonfxmedia

                            301 Redirect non existant pages

                            Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.

                            Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
                            0
                          • scott315

                            How to find temporary redirects of existing site you don't control?

                            I am getting ready to move a clients site from another company. They have like 35 tempory redirects according to MOZ. Question is, how can I find out then current redirects so I can update everything for the new site? Do I need access to the current htaccess file to do this?

                            Technical SEO | | scott315
                            0
                          • MiguelSalcido

                            Why are these internal pages not showing any internal links?

                            If you look at Author profile pages like this one, http://experts.allbusiness.com/author/denise-oberry (THE top contributor on the site with over 82 posts under her belt), or any Author profile page, they show zero internal links or Page Authority. The same goes for most posts for each author on the site. Author pages should show internal links from every post the author has on the site. And specific posts should also have internal links from categories, etc. Yet they show zero. The only posts that show internal links and PA are ones that were either syndicated to the root domain's homepage, or syndicated to Fox Small Business. ZERO internal links. Does anyone know why this is? The root domain does not act this way with Author pages and posts. And I see nothing blocking links or indexing via the robots.txt file or page level nofollow tags. A real head scratcher for this SEO nerd, that I'm sure someone here will have a really simple answer to.

                            Technical SEO | | MiguelSalcido
                            0
                          • ahockley

                            Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.

                            I recently launched a new website.  During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site. When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files.  You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap.  These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section. Bing's webmaster tools are  able to read the site and sitemap just fine. Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?

                            Technical SEO | | ahockley
                            0

                          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.