Should I Remove my Backlinks?

Responses

1. 

   Michael

   16th Mar 2012

   Hi to everyone on this great thread!

   I am a massive advocate of testing, or at least controlling as many vaiables as possible online. I prefer to base my opinions on direct experience -which agency work is fantastic for – but with so many variables to consider however, I think the fairest assessment of results is when first-hand knoweldge is considered alongside the results of other’s trusted opinions.

   Here’s some interesting ‘for and against’ links for futher reading:

   Says they are linkbuilding penalties:
   https://www.linkbuildr.com/google-link-penalties-seo-sabotage-and-the-great-link-conspiracy/

   2 people argue and then trial if there are penalties from linkbuilding:
   https://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/440854-google-flawed-you-can-influence-other-sites-rankings-backlinks-11.html

   Also, SearchEngineLand reported 2011 that Google Webmaster Tools will tell you if they have detected ‘unnatural links pointing to your website’ and to apply for reconsideration once these have been removed, although this does not prove an algorythmic penalty has been applied due to back linking:
   https://searchengineland.com/google-webmaster-notifications-for-bad-links-pointing-at-your-site-84265

   Reply
2. 

   Laura Phillips

   16th Mar 2012

   Great article Oli, and perfectly timed for me. I have to echo Alec’s sentiments on this, and Jim, the idea of being too busy building good links is the way forward! :)

   I’ve received an email this morning from a company I used to work with because they have suddenly disappeared from rankings for three of their top keywords. I have reviewed the site for them twice in the past, and warned them about their SEO company’s dodgy link building activity.

   It would seem the latest changes have caught up with this practice and they have received a rather large slap on the wrist. They’re a great company and deserve to do exceptionally well, but I’m not convinced about the agency they’re using. I believe this sudden drop is due to high levels of spammy and poor quality link building, the consequences of which may take a long time to recover from.

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3. 

   Jim Seward

   16th Mar 2012

   I obviously agree you can’t give the name of the client and nor would I ask you to, I have worked in a “very competitive financial niche” and if it’s the one I think you’re talking about, I agree, the competition was notoriously unscrupulous/black hat.

   The concept of googlebowling is one that has interested me for a number of years and every time I see someone who claims to have proof, said proof is very quickly dismissed as circumstantial and I’ve yet to see a concrete case study. I do wonder if between us, we could do a study, choose a site, attempt to googlebowl it.

   If we could conclusively prove googlebowling does (or doesn’t) exist, that would be awesome conference material. Happy to sacrifice my blog to try and prove/disprove it.

   The J C Penny example was very high profile and they had been called on it publicly before Google introduced the penalty and I believe that was done manually, as are most of the other high profile examples (BMW using doorway pages for example).

   I believe in most cases, the algo will simply discount links it believes have been bought rather than “applying a penalty” People who primarily have paid links as their link source, have their sites devalued in the search and of course tumble down the rankings and scream penalty, but in reality, they are just back to where they were before they started buying the links in the first place.

   Reply
   1. 

      Mike

      19th Mar 2012

      Thanks for the offer Jim.

      We are always looking for new ways to test theories and appreciate the offer of using your own blog to do this testing. As we try to keep all testing secret until results are ready, and as we don’t want to damage your blog we do have to refuse your very generous offer.

      If we do run a test such as this in the future you can be sure it will be right here, on the Koozai blog. Thanks for contributing to such an interesting debate.

      Reply
      1. 

         Jim Seward

         19th Mar 2012

         Don’t worry, I’m fairly confident you wouldn’t damage my blog ;-)

         and no worries, I always enjoy a good debate and I look forward to any results should you guys decide to run such a test :-)

         Reply
4. 

   Alec

   16th Mar 2012

   Thanks for the follow Jim, I have followed you back :)

   Unfortunately I can’t give the name of the client because they are under NDA, but nonetheless they have a well established and successful website with a very strong link profile built up over many years, literally 10,000’s of links from a wide range of sources…

   Then one day their rankings dropped for their primary keyword plunging them into the deep fathoms of unread search results. We investigated the link profile using “Majestic” and were able to determine that all of a sudden they had received a massive number of links from a few websites which were very dodgy looking and from every page.

   The links were hidden in the code, all the same and all of the websites were very similar but not updated for months, aside from these links. The problem I suppose with proving something like this is that you can never eliminate all variables, but given that the site hadn’t changed, and these links were the only thing that stood out as unusual we determined them to be the cause of the problem. Once removed, the sites rankings reappeared very quickly.

   This is in a very competitive financial niche and so the competition are notoriously unscrupulous.

   A final note from me, would be this, buying links is a punishable offence by Google and there are strong examples of this like J C Penny, who have been Google Slapped publicly for partaking in these activities… This, I believe, demonstrates that bad links can result in a penalty from Google.. Furthermore I believe that this demonstrates that if Google thinks that you have bought links or the links look suspicious that they will (and have) penalised websites.

   What say you sir?

   Reply
5. 

   Jim Seward

   16th Mar 2012

   Hey Alec, started following you on Twitter this morning :-)

   I think for those sort of things to affect a site, the site in question would need to have a particularly poor incoming link profile anyway and it’s links made up primarily of poor quality incoming links.

   I would be interested however in an actual study showing evidence of a quality site being essentially “googlebowled” even under test circumstances

   Reply
6. 

   Alec

   16th Mar 2012

   Hi Jim,

   Thanks for your comments, always nice to see some debate springing up.

   I would contest the point you made that no incoming links can harm your rankings… Working agency side we see a lot of dodgy links, hidden links or sitewide links which can negatively effect your rankings. In a couple of cases we have determined that this has been done by a competitor of a client for the purpose of damaging their rankings.

   I think this kind of thing only becomes a problem when your rankings are badly affected, at which point you may need to stop building links and look to remove the bad ones causing your website to drop from the SERPs.

   Reply
7. 

   Oliver

   16th Mar 2012

   Hi Jim,

   Thanks for your comment.

   In my experience I have seen great results from removing pointless incoming links (in particular irrelevant sitewide links and links on the same IP).

   If you continue to test the effectiveness of your link profile then weeding out links can certainly be a worthwhile practice.

   Reply
   1. 

      Jim Seward

      16th Mar 2012

      Hey Oliver

      Afraid we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one, I work on the principal that no incoming link can harm your rankings, if this would be the case, it would be very easy to affect your competitors rankings.

      If you were to contact webmasters and suggest changing the site wide link to an in context link, I can see it improving your rankings but asking to remove it completely I can see having either a detrimental or no effect at all.

      Personally I’m too busy building quality links to worry about removing the pointless ones anyway ;-)

      Reply
8. 

   Jim Seward

   16th Mar 2012

   Interesting post, some I agree with

   Varied anchor text
   avoiding link farms etc

   However I would say that with regards to Irrelevent links/links on same IP, sitewide links, I couldn’t disagree more.

   Don’t get me wrong, I think that they won’t be as valuable as proper in copy links from related sites on different IPs surrounded by semantically linked text, however these types of links are not useless and they certainly couldn’t harm your rankings by having them.

   If I could harm my rankings by making the links you outline above, I would simply start making them for my competitors. There is no such thing as a bad incoming link, there is however such a thing as a pointless incoming link or a link that won’t carry as much value based upon the things you’ve outlined.

   Reply