Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@Teginder, you asked "But I think, it is really tough to understand what type of a link is organic ? Sometime I feel a links seems pretty natural is also gets caught under Google violation radar. WHY?"

The likely answer is your thoughts about whether a link is organic or manipulative are not calibrated to how Google views links. It takes a lot of time and experience to consistently reach the proper diagnosis for each link.

@Monali, you asked about links from "your sister websites". In my experience, people who ask this type of question have many "sister websites" and the links are likely deemed to be manipulative. Why offer the link from "500 pages"? Is the link relevant for users on all those pages?

You need to be VERY careful when you create a link from one of your owned websites to another, especially if you have been already caught violating Google's Quality Guidelines. The safest approach is to either remove, nofollow or 302 the links from your own websites which point at each other.

If you operate two websites where website A sells sneakers and website B sells socks, then it may make sense to provide links from the sneaker site to the sock site on most pages. With that said, it would likely be best to simply combine the websites into a single site.

The summary here: it is possible for a site owner to provide links between two sites which are not manipulative, but the links need to be presented in a high quality manner. The overwhelming majority of site owners who ask me this type of question operate many websites, have a manipulative link issue, and the interlinking between their own websites is a contributing factor to that issue.

Hi Monali,

You asked "do we need to contact websites which have domain authority more than 75 or 85 ? Or the point is, even if the website is 99 domain authority , do we need to contact them to remove it?"

Once you compile a list of site backlinks, the next step is to review links from each domain to determine if the links are organic (i.e. comply with Google's Quality Guidelines) or manipulative in nature. To that end, DA is irrelevant.

I am sure no one at Google considers the DA or PR of a page when making a determination of a link's authenticity. For example, all links from any subdomain on wordpress.com, blogspot.com, plus.google.com and so forth have very high DA, but they can still be manipulative. There are new sites created daily with a DA of 1, yet their links are organic.

You also asked "There are few forums and websites, where our links are showing from forum signatures, etc. "

In most cases, forum signature links would likely be considered manipulative. If you provided a forum signature which sincerely added value to each and every post, those links could be considered organic, but if you are asking the question, that is likely not the case.

@Teginder, you commented "...you just need to remove links only if those domains have no relevancy to your niche"

Relevancy to a site's niche is not a metric in determining whether a link is organic or manipulative. The link's compliance to Google's Quality Guidelines should be the focus.

I could have a site which sells shirts and gain links from a graphic design or UX site that talks how good or bad my web site design looks. That link would not be relevant to selling shirts but would still be perfectly organic. On the other hand, many links are built from relevant sites that are manipulative.

You each are focusing on what value a link offers to the site. The link's value is not relevant to determining if it is organic vs manipulative.

There are tens of millions of active websites will ???trillions / quadrillions or some other number which is beyond the boundaries of human concept of web pages. Each company, including Google, sets their servers to crawl the web each month. Even large companies cannot provide enough web servers to crawl every page every month, not to mention every day.

Accordingly, each offers a piece of the puzzle. Google's WMT report shows approximately 50% of the backlinks for your site. The other reports each fill in part of the remaining data.

If you earn a link from high quality sites like the New York Times, it is likely all the tools will show the link. When you are dealing with web spam, a lot of it comes from low quality sites which are not frequently crawled. OSE is a fantastic tool but you cannot depend on it to show all the links to your site.

There are numerous tools which provide backlink data. You will find each tool provides different data, which can be frustrating. The best solution is to use a combination of tools. In my experience, the combination which always works to resolves Google penalties is: Google WMT + Bing WMT + OSE + AHREFS + Majestic.

OSE, for example, provides a maximum of 25 links per domain. The important thing is to obtain a representative sample of links from each domain to determine if the domain is providing organic or manipulative links. In most cases, if you have more than 25 links from a domain, you likely have a site wide link or a common link, such as in the sidebar.

I am working on a moz blog post which will include an e-mail template. I'll get back to you on this request.

You are welcome to use nofollow links in any manner you see fit. If these links actually drive quality traffic to your site, go ahead and leave them.

As a note, not all vB forums provide nofollow links. It is up to each forum operator.

Monali,

As a general rule, I strongly discourage your submission to either link directories, article directories or blog directories. I would also discourage your linking to your site from various other websites you create be they from tumblr, blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc. These methods as you are describing them at worst would be deemed manipulative links, at best would add little-to-no value to your site.

Instead, create the maximum amount of value you can for users on your site. Create content that others will WANT to share, tweet, like, +1, and link to. You did not share your site URL so I'll use the Joomla extension concept you mentioned. Let's talk about that for a moment. Take your extensive knowledge of Joomla and think about how site owners wish to extend the core functionality in ways the software does not support. This gap creates the market for extensions.

When we look for extensions to add to client websites, we have a few considerations:

1. Who is behind the extension? Some extensions are produced by a single individual, others by development companies, and still others are produced by larger companies. For example, Janrain is a major provider of social integration software and they produced an extension for WordPress. The support they provide for their extension is world class. They have a ticketing system where experienced techs promptly respond. On the other hand, some extensions are produced by individuals or companies who are completely non-responsive to support requests.

2. How much experience does the producer have with the extension's purpose and the platform. Ideally, you want to work with an author who is experienced in both Joomla and the particular area (let's say an SEO extension produced by a SEO company for example). Is this extension the first one produced by the individual or company?

3. Joomla has extension standards. Were these standards met and is the extension listed on Joomla Extension Directory (JED)?

4. Does the extension fill a gap which adds value? Let's say you make a 404 log extension. That adds value by offering site owners a way to understand more about broken links. The basic extension can be greatly improved by adding more features such as:

• having the 404 log accessible via the admin panel rather than a regular log file which is otherwise difficult to read

• having the 404 log update live

• capturing the referring URL so the site owner can see where the link came from

• capturing the search term used (practically an outdated concept now, but still...)

• possibly automatically redirecting users to the most closely related URL

Such an extension could add real value to users. If you review posts on Joomla.org or various SEO and forum sites, you may step into a conversation where users are discussing problems and add value to the conversation by mentioning the extension as a solution. The site can also categorize extensions by their ratings and other factors.

Understand Joomla already provides an extension directory so what added value does your site offer?

My recommendation is spend 100% of your "link building" time and effort addressing the above areas. If you do a fantastic job, you will EARN better links then you could have ever built yourself, and none of the earned links will be viewed as manipulative.

TLDR - build VALUE, not links

The first part of the battle is knowing your links. Each source of backlink information, including Google, has advantages and disadvantages. I have been resolving manipulative link issues for clients since 2011 (i.e. before Penguin) and what has worked in 100% of cases is a backlink report comprised of data from the following 5 sources: Google, Bing, AHREFs, Majestic and OSE. This combination of backlink data has always worked. That is not to say there are not other sources of backlinks which can be used.

Once you have a comprehensive list of all linking domains, the next step is to visit each site and determine if the links are manipulative or organic. Covering that topic fully would be a very lengthy article but in brief:

1. Closely examine Google's Quality Guidelines.

2. Remove any links you, or anyone else acting on the site's behalf (i.e. "SEO", link builder, developer, etc) built.

3. Remove links you created to the site from other sites you own

4. For each link ask "How did this link get here?" If the answer is the site owner independently created the link for their own reasons, that is great. This type of link is a naturally EARNED organic link. If there was any undue influence from the site owner which caused the link to be created, it is likely a manipulative link.

5. Take a look at the other links from that site. If the site offers links to other spammy sites, that is a very bad sign. Would you be ashamed for your customers to see this link?

6. Where is the link? Is it in content (which is strongly preferred) or is it in a sidebar or footer where spammy links are more likely to be found.

There is no hard and fast rules. There are guidelines. Ultimately you look at links and determine if they possess the qualities of an organic or manipulative link.

With respect to automated link identification services, there are two problems. First, they will typically identify some organic links as manipulative. Secondly, they will identify some manipulative links as organic. Both issues are highly problematic. You get what you pay for.

Good Luck.

You are welcome to work with the URLs in search results. I am unsure what numbers you are attempting to match.

You can check the redirects by uploading the LIST of URLs to Screaming Frog, which will then crawl the list and inform you of any header responses (301, 302, etc)

I am unclear on your second question. You previously stated the site involved is not a client and you do not have access to Webmaster Tools. What exactly are you asking or suggesting?

Your original question expressed a desire to locate "all" redirects for a given URL. It is highly unlikely to locate all such links without access to the link data in Google WMT and Bing WMT, along with the referrer data in GA.

The best you can do to find external URLs is to build a comprehensive backlink report using data from multiple providers (OSE, AHREFs, Majestic, etc). You should know from the start you will not cover all the links unless you are working with pages which have a low number of links.

I used to use Xenu until shortly after Dr Pete shared this blog (http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog) which introduced me to Screaming Frog. Both will work, but you will find XENU is more like using DOS whereas Screaming Frog has a very nice interface.

For internal 301s, you can clearly crawl the site and export a list of all 301 redirects to the target page.

For external URLs, there is not a simple method. I suggest two tactics:

1. Examine your analytics for referring URLs

2. Examine your backlink reports for links to the page

You can then crawl the list of URLs and determine which pages are being redirected. With the above understood, the primary concern should be your internal URLs.