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Hey Elaine, It looks very likely that 404ing a page would indeed remove the impact of spam links to those pages. I found an older article where Google said as much: https://www.seroundtable.com/404-links-google-15427.html Around the same time, John Mu said about the same thing: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/C-OoaJfb0Yg Based on this, you shouldn't even need to disavow those links after 404ing the URLs. Hope this helps and good luck! Mike

100% agree

There's nothing I can really add, Egol gave you the short and best possible answer

There's nothing technically wrong with the link / page: It has a self referencing canonical which doesn't point elsewhere The link does not utilise a no-follow tag The page is not blocked from indexation via Meta no-index or robots.txt The domain and sub-domain level metrics for this site are strong in Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs! The Moz link explorer will only handle domains, sub-domains or exact URLs. On Ahrefs and Majestic I also have the option to check SEO authority by 'path', which means the cumulative SEO authority and inbound metrics for all pages contained within the "/employabilitypoints/" folder Although the sub-domain has nearly 100,000 backlinks connecting with it, I can only find evidence of 7 backlinks to this specific section of the site (and not all of those are still live) It might be possible that although the site is pretty good, the area of the site where you gained the link isn't worth that much. As such, all crawlers (including Moz, Googlebot, Ahrefs etc) are unlikely to prioritise updating their databases re: this specific area of the web Although all crawlers work differently and have different paths they follow in terms of indexing web-content, most of them will prioritise 'more important' pages (or site sections) for updates. Different crawl bots determine what they feel is important, in different ways Although neither Moz nor Ahrefs seem to have picked up on the link, Majestic SEO has and using ctrl+F you can find it recorded here: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer/top-backlinks?folder=&q=jftwines.com&oq=jftwines.com&IndexDataSource=F

I was actually browsing for review on linksmanagement when I found this post. Please, my domain authority recently fell for my blog Torchbankz. So I'm in need of something fast to help my SEO Because I noticed it also affect my post ranking. Even with this is it recommended.

Hello, I have submitted an article on my Digital Marketing Company in Surat on various Free Article Submission sites. I received an email from Hubpages.com for duplicate content on my article, the link is here as under: https://hubpages.com/business/SEO-Digital-Marketing-Courses-DigiMark-A-Professional-IT-company-in-Surat Please advise whether I can submit the same article to other sites? It will help to me. Thanks in advance, Nisha

Hi, The best answer to your question is this post https://moz.com/blog/seo-value-nofollow-links Regards

Thank you very much. It's clearer now. Very much appreciated!

So glad to help!

Do I need to create a campaign to work with free SEO? Well in theory SEO is free but the resources are not free Campaigns are only for paid search with Google Ads, right? I will not recommend you start with Google Ads if you even have a site to rank

Hi H.M.N! Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. So, what you'll be doing is to build a complete set of both structured and unstructured citations/linktations for each of your public-facing offices. For each location you will: Have a page on your website featuring excellent, unique content Create, claim and manage a Google My Business listing Create and manage structured citations on the major data aggregators and directories (Acxiom, Yelp, Infogroup, YP, etc.) Create and manage structured citations on any further directories that are specific to your industry or geography (like Avvo for lawyers or Healthgrades for doctors) Seek out unstructured citation/linktation opportunities on platforms like news sites, blogs, local business associations, event sites, etc. to grow the authority of each location You'll go through this process for each of your locations. As far your structured citations go (the ones on platforms like YP, Yelp, etc.) there is no cause for concern about listing multiple locations. Whole Foods Market must have hundreds of Yelp listings, after all, and there is no reason to worry that Google might find this suspicious. As far as your unstructured citations/linktations go, these you will need to handle more singly. What might this look like? Let's say your business is a legal firm in the San Francisco Bay Area with 4 locations. Your office in Oakland could sponsor something like a Know Your Rights Camp event in Oakland. Your office in Berkeley could create a scholarship for law students at UC Berkeley. You have 2 offices in San Rafael. One could be cited in a news article in the Marin IJ online newspaper and another could join the local chamber of commerce. Etc, etc. So, the difference for a multi-location model like yours would be that your structured citations for all locations can all be easily created on the same set of local business listing platforms, but that your unstructured citation/linktation development program will require more creativity and greater uniqueness. A single article in a newspaper is unlikely to cite and link to all 4 of your offices, right? All of the above represents quite a bit of work, of course. Multi-locations typically need to automate part of this process. I highly recommend that, if you're a Moz Pro customer, you explore the Link Intersect tool to help you with the research for linktation opportunities, and if you have signed up for Moz Local, it will take care of many of your most important structured citations. Hope this helps!

Yes, it would potentially boost the pages on your high-priority site, but there a lot of variables in terms of whether it has an equal effect on the new URL as it does on the current one. Perhaps more importantly, you run a much higher risk of losing these links altogether if the sites providing them discover that users are being taken to a different site than that in the link.

This depends upon the nature of your link amendment task. If for example, most of the links are pointing to an old architecture for your site (say your site moved from the HTTP to the HTTPS protocol) then amending the links is better, as it means the link equity won't be diluted through redirects. Even a straight A-to-B 301 redirect loses some equity, though it does a pretty good job of insulation. Usually in this situation your canonical HTTP to HTTPS redirects should be catching those links anyway If you're redirecting links which result in 404s, you can certainly use 301s but unless the content and theme of the destination URL is very similar to the removed page (which now 404s through inbound links) - then not much of the equity will shift across. Certainly it is better to actually get the links amended. My advice is, do as many amends as humanly possible (it is tedious, it will take time). For those who don't respond at all in 2-3 weeks, clean them up with 301s. If they later respond and amend their link, you could then remove that 301 to keep your htaccess file / web.config file nice and clean... Hope that helps

Thanks for your answer

That will depend on the directory tools like Synup, Moz Local can tell you when they go up on certain sites. If it's not a popular one there are a few different scenarios : Do they give you a temporary page that is only visible to you and will go live after it's approved? You can check the HTTP header response fo it and if it returns 200 it's probably approved and live. Do they give you a live URL that says it's pending verification? Scrape the page and use XPath to see id that bit of text changes. etc Give us some more info on it and perhaps we can help.

This doesn't ring true to me because: There are all kinds of ways you can find links to your site (referring traffic in GA, link analysis sources like moz's own tools, ahrefs, majestic etc, and tools like Google Alerts) You've already got the link in these cases, so you would have no incentive to "bother" the webmasters In general, my experience has been that most providers want to tell you about as many placements as they can! Add to this some of the phrasing (e.g. "webmasters we have" -- emphasis mine) suggests that there may be payments taking place or other schemes afoot that place these well outside the Google guidelines. Per the conversation in the other comments - I would recommend that you get at least a statement of work in place to govern what you are expecting for the money you are paying even if you are not committing to a long-term contract. This could include agreements on any of the above (what information they will provide you with, what you will do with that information etc). At the very least, you should want to understand the techniques in use in order to make your own informed decisions about the risks and rewards. Hope that helps.

Thanks Lowry for replying. For this event we won't pay single dollar for back links. As I told the main purpose is building relationship with bloggers and if they like my event they will link to my site.

Not a problem I find that all too often, if the question is a bit ambiguous - people will ignore it. If there are only a handful of interpretations, I will still try to answer

In general, websites that allow you to 'submit' (and therefore create guaranteed links) are usually of intrinsically low value. At most, they usually don't boost your rankings meaning that you have wasted your own time. In link building, quality trumps quantity (volume) every time. Instead of thinking which directories or article-wheels to submit your content (or site) to, think about the value-add. Does anyone really browse most of those directories or do most people just Google it? Will anyone see your page? How often - one person per year? **Will they follow the link? **(that's a key question) Relevance is about more than just semantic contextual word-play. Just because some website is about the same thing as your website, that doesn't mean that any and all links which you place 'must surely be relevant'. Why is it relevant for a user to follow the link? That's real relevance. If you are considering relevance without thinking about end-user value-add, then you're just saying words and not really taking the Google philosophy to heart. It's about creating something that adds value to the web (something which other websites don't supply). If your site doesn't add value to the web, then it has to do something that another site already does, but infinitely better (in such a way that users flock to it, like how FaceBook killed MySpace). If you're not adding value to the online community and you're not putting in the effort to sink the competition through sheer effort and positive energy, never expect to rank well. Link 'building' isn't what it used to be (in terms of how easy it is to shoot up rankings), Google's Penguin algorithm (now integrated into its core algo-set) can see through thin, 'made just for SEO' content and links in an absolute heartbeat. You really need to think about your service and how to style it a heck of a lot better. You want people engaging with your female escorts? I'm not here to judge - but those websites don't do much to push their talents as a 'premium' service. Even with solid, powerful links - the sites linking to you would probably just get penalised instead of your site(s) doing well (sorry! But it's probably true). If you can escape the bare-minimum effort mentality, you can succeed in modern SEO. Ger with the long-termist philosophy. If you just want to make a quick buck with PBNs and stuff like that, there are (assuredly) better communities to service your needs than this one

You might be able to get some highly relevant referral traffic from forums, so forum links aren't completely useless. But as Logan and Martijn said, if you are doing this type of link building purely for SEO reasons, then your time is definitely better spent elsewhere. Cheers, David