A lot of backlinks from outside of niche – bad?

[dsumter]

We have received a lot of backlinks over the years by users putting links on their websites to their home pages on our site, eg:

our.domain/user1

our.domain/user2

…

our.domain/user100000

There are 10’s of thousands of these backlinks, all natural, but many of them come from blogs that are completely outside of our niche. Only a small percentage of our backlinks 1% to 5% could actually be coming from pages related to our niche, the other 95%+ could be users just linking to their home pages.

Could this really hurt us..? We have 1000’s of backlinks related to our niche, yet we’ve noticed that some competitors with less than 50 backlinks can outrank us for certain keywords..

Also related, we’ve noticed these user links popping up on a lot of spammy sites, directories, etc. We didn’t create them but we’re disavowing them now to be safe. So this could also be hitting our rankings.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi David,

Sounds like you're on the right track there which is great, though it's often better to fix the problem rather than mask it with de-indexing. Even something like giving people an opportunity to write a bio about themselves could be a great way to get some unique content on these otherwise-empty pages as a quick example.

I have seen a correlation between bounce rate and rankings. This doesn't necessarily mean causation of course but whether it's because of that bounce rate or the reason__s people are bouncing less, the ranking result is going to be the same

Moz also covered this topic back in August too.

[dsumter]

Thanks Chris, that's an excellent insight..

We've actually started to deindex all the 'thin' pages, but it will unfortunately take months for Google to recrawl all. And I think a restructuring is in order as you say. We're busy putting a 'learning' section together (similar to moz but much smaller), so we're going to feature this more prominently too.

I think you're correct about interaction. We receive a lot of organic traffic to these thin pages and people bounce quite quickly. We used to value this traffic, but now I think it just hurts us because of quick bounces. So we're addressing this now with deindexing, better titles and descriptions, and on-page elements to improve interaction.

Two years ago we never had these thin user pages indexed and our main landing pages dominated the rankings.

Have you seen any correlations recently between bounce rate and rankings slip...?

[dsumter]

Thanks Paddy, great response, that clarifies things for me..

I don't think we've picked up any penalties because the majority of links look fine, they're just off-topic. But as a risk mitigation we've started to clear out the users and disavow the domains that look bad. It's unlikely we're receiving any real link juice from these spammy sites anyway..

[ChrisAshton]

Ok, that does make things a little different. Having genuinely organic links like this isn't really going to be a dangerous thing in this context. Since they really are legitimate, there will be a decent spread of anchor text, placement etc and you've already got thousands of relevant links as well.

Think of it like social media - Facebook and Twitter rank just fine for a number of things and they have billions of links from all over the Internet. My guess is that the current ranking issues are more related to onsite elements and perhaps the way users are interacting with your site.

There are quite a few pages that are very thin and thousands that offer 0 unique content.

The home page does a pretty good job of giving me the basics but if I were going to sign up, I'd want a little more information so perhaps this would be a good place to start. Create a page detailing each of those home page sections and how they're helpful to me.

If you do go down this route, make sure they're put somewhere handy in the nav. You don't want your important pages to be buried 5 clicks deep in the nav; push them as close to the top level as practical.

There are a number of other onsite elements that could be improved too, like H1s (most just say "What is twiends") and image alt text as some basic examples.

I hope that helps!

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi David,

In terms of whether these links could hurt you, I'd be more concerned about the quality of the links than the topic. If the majority of links pointing at these user generated pages are low quality, then that would be of concern and you may want to disavow the ones that are very low quality such as the spammy sites / directories etc that you've found. You may even want to go as far as removing pages where the people who set them up are clearly spamming the pages hoping to get them to rank for some reason.

The fact they come from websites that are off-topic is a slight concern but they shouldn't "hurt" you as long as they are genuinely natural and it doesn't look like manipulation. If you're also generating links to other areas of the site that are on topic, then I wouldn't worry too much.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the response to David's question. I just wanted to clarify, I don't think David is referring to the topic of these pages or the links from these pages out to other websites. I believe he is referring to links from external websites pointing inwards towards these user generated pages. Therefore, Panda isn't something that should come into consideration.

Cheers.

Paddy

[dsumter]

Hi, yes exactly..

Our site provides each user with a profile page that shows their latest tweets, photos, etc. So a lot of users like to list it as a home page in various places. eg:

http://twiends.com/cnn

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Dave,

I'm not 100% sure I understand the issue here. Do you mean users set up a profile on your website then link to that profile from their site? Kind of like if I put a link on our site to my Moz profile?

[dsumter]

Hi Peter, thanks for the response, that looks like a good doc, I'll read through it now..

Please note, I don't have any way to remove the backlinks to our site or make them nofollow. They exist on 10,000 other websites.. The only thing I can do is disavow them, but this is not what the disavow tool is designed for..

Did you perhaps misread what I was asking..?

Many thanks

Dave

[Mobilio]

This is discussed many times. And answer is YES. You can see here what Josh Bachynski says:
http://themoralconcept.net/pandalist.html
Look on #5 in section Low quality factors.

That's why you can see here or in blog sections moderators often remove links to sites. Because some people just make comment to get a link to their site. You should do this too. Or make them "nofollow" at least.